TRACES OF WAR

Photography as resilience, revealing the necessary over-protection that was so lacking on October 7, 2023, particularly with regard to children. I arrived at kibbutz Shluhot a few days before October 7, 2023 to visit my daughter in Israël since 2005 and living in the kibbutz with her family since the covid pandemic. I come mainly for the holidays. I know the place very well. The discovery of the horror perpetrated was a moment of stupefaction whose effects have not faded. In fact, it seems to me that the more time goes by, the more the difficulty of "thinking" that "never again" could be invalidated, upsets us a little more every day. The massacres of children and babies, right up to their abduction, has produced a kind of void, a gaping hole. It took me several weeks to grasp what my eye was "seeing": Shluhot, although located in the north, resembled the kibbutz in the south, with a high number of fathers, sons, husbands called up to fight in the south. My thoughts go out first and foremost to all children. They are nothing but fragile and abandoned by the adults who are supposed to protect them. As the NGO Visions du Monde states : "250 million children live in a country at war"