Mariam Abu Dagga (also reported as Mariam Dagga), a 33-year-old freelance photojournalist from Gaza who worked with the Associated Press, has died. She was killed yesterday, on August 25, 2025, during an Israeli bombardment of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis; four other reporters were also killed in the same attack. The attack unfolded in two waves, as rescuers and journalists rushed to the scene. 

Who was Miriam Dagga

Born and raised in Khan Younis, she graduated from Al-Aqsa University and entered journalism in 2015. One of the few female visual journalists in the Gaza Strip, in recent months she had worked as a freelancer for AP and other outlets.

The work of Miriam Dagga

Her work was to tell the story of everyday life under siege, with particular attention to malnourished children treated at Nasser. A few days before her death, she had documented those wards for AP; on social media she shared fragments from fieldwork and words addressed to her son, in a spare and courageous diary. Colleagues describe Mariam Dagga as a tenacious professional, able to «bring the camera into the heart of the field» and to bear witness with rare honesty to the pain of what is happening in Palestine. 

From our point of view, her photographic archive is the opposite of spectacular heroism. To our eyes, it is the closest thing to a true on-the-ground presence. A way of inhabiting stories that centers the smallest gestures—the doctors’ hands, the relatives’ held breaths. This is where photography stops being a mere image and becomes testimony, the only possible form of closeness for those like us who are not on the front line.