New Media Adviser

This photo dated December 6, 2011 shows Afghan Shia Muslim 12-year-old Tarana Akbari crying near dead and injured people after explosions during a religious ceremony at the Abul Fazel shrine in the centre of Kabul where Shia Muslims were marking the Day of Ashura. Photo by Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography - AFP

AFP’s Massoud Hossaini won the award for breaking news photography ‘for his heartbreaking image of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber’s attack at a crowded shrine in Kabul’, the committee announced.

“When I could stand up, I saw that everybody was around me on the ground, really bloody. I was really, really scared,” said the girl, whose name means “melody,” and whose age has been given as either 10 or 12.

Sig Gissler, the Pulitzer administrator, called the AFP picture ‘one single riveting photograph’, and ‘a picture you will long remember’.

International Humanitarian Law states that parties to a conflict must do all they can to prevent harm to civilians. Deliberate targeting of civilians is absolutely prohibited.

This project reports on life as experienced by men, women and children in Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel): their lives and their survival on a daily basis. Under difficult living conditions and the threat of air attacks and bombings, people do keep on working, loving and dreaming. Life in spite of everything.

In order to document this will to live, short chronicles (2 minutes each) will be shot by both Israeli and Palestinian teams, day after day for two months. These short stories will follow six characters from Gaza and six from Sderot. In this way, we will have a new story of each character every week, and the viewer will be able to follow them intimately for 10 weeks. The stories will be aired via the Internet and users will have a personal, interactive and non-linear access to these contents on the site ARTE France which will include the videos, blogs, forums, links etc.

Gaza Sderot is an original project broadcast by Arte.tv, the official site of ARTE, the French-German cultural television station, in coproduction with an Israeli team - Alma Films/Trabelsi Productions in cooperation with The Sapir College in Sderot, a Palestinian team - Ramattan Studios, a French documentary production company - Bo Travail ! and an interactive production company Upian.com.