Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Youssef Al-Qutb did not pursue a career in photography after obtaining academic degrees or from early experience. Rather, his experience may be the most advanced of all academic degrees in this field, as he entered it after sustaining injuries from phosphorus bombs in Shebaa (a contact point in southern Lebanon) during the October War in 1973.
Since that date, Al-Qutb has been chronicling his life through pictures he took, and through snapshots that carried with them a lot of danger and fear, and a lot of desire to continue and record every event that passes in the lives of his people in order to preserve it for future generations.
Youssef Al-Qutb (56 years old) never neglected his photographs despite the temptations of money. He used to carry his archive and his influence on his clothes when he immigrated to every new country during his life’s journey, which resembles the life of many Palestine Liberation Organization fighters.
Al-Qutb tells Wafa (he has five daughters and two sons, and he is a grandfather to seventeen grandchildren) about his experience in media work in a sequential manner and with keen memory.
He said, “My relationship with media work and photography began after many years of guerrilla work. In 1973, I suffered burns in my feet due to phosphorus bombs that enemy planes were launching at the time on the Shebaa area in southern Lebanon. In the hospital, the then Unified Media Officer, Majid Abu Sharar, came to visit me, and during Talking to me, he asked me to learn photography.
He continues: Indeed, after completing my treatment, I went to the central photography headquarters, and its head was then Hani Jawhariya, and with him were Omar Al-Mukhtar, Abu Zarif, Mutee Ibrahim, Ibrahim Al-Masdar, Hassan Al-Kharouf, Muhammad Shuqair, and Mahmoud Nofal, and after completing my intensive training period for several days, I took A camera followed me like a shadow, and I set off towards the south, where the guerrilla bases and clash points with the occupation forces were, to work as a military correspondent. My return to the headquarters was only to deliver pictures, and it was not a daily basis.
Al-Qutb laughs as he remembers these days and says, “As my experience increased, I began to feel the need to deliver my work on a daily basis, so I bought a motorcycle, and I walked back and forth daily to the fighters’ sites and photographed all the events of the civil war and the Israeli invasion of the south in 1978, during which I was hit by shells in my back.” With my colleague Abu Zarif on March 15, my colleagues Omar Al-Mukhtar and Ibrahim Nasser were martyred.
He added: I also photographed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and all the daily events of the PLO, from festivals, military parades, camps, martyrs and wounded, to the daily life of Palestinian refugees. I loved photographing guerrilla operations behind enemy lines, photographing battles, Israeli bombing and the resulting destruction, in addition to pictures of Palestinian fighters alongside pictures of camps.
The pole's experience began to mature and be refined through training courses he received in 1979 in Poland and in 1980 for several months. He received training in Beirut by trainers from the German Democratic Republic and completed it with a course in the trainers' country for three months.
Al-Qutb cannot determine the number of photos and scenes he took, and says that they are in the hundreds of thousands, or perhaps the number reached a million.
Al-Qutb left the Lebanese capital, Beirut, with his life equipment, his photographs, in which he carried his history and the history of the liberation movement, with him to Tunisia, where he worked on photographing the activities of the Liberation Organization, in addition to organizing photo exhibitions for the benefit of embassies.
He remained in Tunisia until he returned to Gaza in 1994 and left in 1996 for Ramallah to be close to his family and mother in Jerusalem.
The first pictures of the Pole in the homeland were pictures of the sea and the camps in Gaza.
“The pictures of the camp are the closest to my heart,” said Qutb, who also made a complete survey of most of Gaza’s landmarks, which he returned to photograph in the year 2000, to feel the clear and obvious difference despite the short period. He used the same method in Ramallah, even though his first pictures in the West Bank were pictures. Jerusalem with all its landmarks.
With the second intifada and the wave of Israeli invasions and attacks on the headquarters of the late martyr Yasser Arafat and on citizens, Al-Qutb returned to his previous routine in the Wind Photography Competition, despite devoting his work time at the time to arranging his archive, which began to turn into part of the “Wafa” agency’s photo archive.
Today, after all these years, Al-Qotb has begun to photograph nature, away from the city’s noise, bustle, and political events, hoping to find healing for his soul, which was tired of long periods of travel, diaspora, and covering battles.
Many of the images and scenes that he experienced and experienced in his professional life still affect Al-Qutb, perhaps because of their human character and perhaps because he escaped certain death. Regarding these situations, he said, “During the Lebanese civil war, I was in Damour, and I saw a group of children gathered around a missile from the aerial bombardment.” The Israeli did not explode, and based on my war experience, I asked the people of the area to keep their children away because it is a type of temporary missile that can explode at any moment. Indeed, I did not move 30 meters away from the place until the missile exploded, and I saw people flying. I was only able to take one picture and it was without lighting. Only smoke and dust appeared, and then, due to the force of pressure, the camera no longer filmed.
One of the pictures that still affects Al-Qutb is his photography of his burning house in Sabra, and about that he says, “During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I searched for the tallest building in the Barbir area to photograph the intense bombing on the Sabra area, and he directed his camera to capture the scene of the houses burning there, and he was talking to himself, God knows best.” From this, may God help his family.
He added, "The next morning, I went to the place to discover that the fire I photographed was consuming my house and the house of my colleague Ibrahim Al-Masdar."
There are scenes that Al-Qutb did not photograph despite his experiencing them, and in which a new life was written for him and he was classified as a martyr. In the year 1976, during the civil war, he was on his way back to his home in Sabra at 12 noon (this area is usually crowded with citizens because it is a shopping center, so there There is a market for vegetables and foodstuffs.
He said, "I was on my way to Sabra. Suddenly a torrent of shells began hitting the area. I woke up and found myself on the ground and began to feel myself. I removed the hand and leg of one of the victims who had been struck by the shells. There were many victims and blood around me. I stood there so I could photograph the scene, but something hit me." Heavy weight on my head and I fainted again. I woke up when I felt someone trying to pull the camera from my neck, so I shouted at him asking him to return it. He became agitated and started shouting, “One good, one good.” I was not injured, but I was covered in blood.
Regarding his dreams, which he has not yet achieved and which he hoped to achieve, Qutb tells us a story he lived with a number of fighters in a guerrilla base in the Shebaa area. He says, “There were three of us in a guerrilla base, and we were chatting about our dreams, which were centered around martyrdom. My friend Abu al-Hayja (Asmaa) Harkiyya) was a mortar artillery shooter, and he dreamed of being martyred while bombing the enemy in northern Palestine, and that actually came true for him, so he was martyred when his cannon exploded while he was bombing. Likewise, Abu Saqr, who wished for martyrdom as he fired his machine gun at the occupation soldiers until he emptied his ammunition, and joined the Israeli soldier either He killed or was killed, and this happened to him. His ammunition actually ran out and he grabbed the Israeli soldier by the hair, but the soldier stabbed him in the chest.'
Qutb added, “As for me, I was hoping to be martyred in an operation inside the homeland, and I was wounded with them but was not martyred. I returned to the homeland and I do not know if I would die a martyr on its land, but I feel very comfortable psychologically. My only fear while photographing the battles was for my family and children, whom I feared.” They have to live as an orphan in exile, as exile is harsh for the average person, let alone an orphan, and it seems that this feeling still affects me, so I get headaches whenever I travel outside the country and I do not get rid of them until I return.'
It seems that fate painted a strange life for Youssef Al-Qutb. He joined the ranks of the Palestinian revolution and was only 13 years old at the time. His story is perhaps the story of many Palestinian guerrillas who sacrificed their lives and their futures to chart a new path and new hope in the lives of the Palestinian people.
The turning point in his life was in 1968, the year that determined his fate. His brother Abdel Razzaq was arrested in a military operation he carried out against a cinema in Jerusalem with his colleague Abdel Salam Al-Hamouri. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released in a prisoner exchange after 18 years.
He says: I was listening to my brother and uncle’s discussions while planning military action (his uncle was martyred in Beirut) and I told him I wanted to carry out an operation. I became more urgent after my brother was arrested and he told me I will make you carry out an operation. He asked me to light a fire and throw a thermos in it and then it will explode and hit the Israelis, so I did that. At the Hebron Gate, I ran away, believing that they would catch me.
He continues: A few days after this incident, I witnessed the evacuation and demolition of homes around the Buraq Wall, and I found myself on the second day carrying a small knife and attacking two female soldiers and wounding one of them. I was arrested and handed over to the police headquarters in Jerusalem. The police headquarters at that time included Palestinian policemen with men. Israeli police and the Palestinian officer asked me during the investigation to give false information about my person. After closing the report, he asked me to run away and told me that the soldier standing at the door would pursue me but would not catch me.
He added: I went back to my mother and informed her that I would escape to work with the guerrillas in Amman across the river, but she calmed me down and told me that she would deliver me, and in fact she completed the procedures and took me by her hand to the Cubs camp, whose official at the time was the late Sakhr Abu Nizar. Shortly after that, I took a fighters’ course in the Sukhna camp and then I moved to the base of the martyr Khaled Abu Al-Ala in Irbid. After the September battles (battles that took place between the Fedayeen and the Jordanian army forces), Abu Ali Iyad asked me to work in Al-Wahdat camp to secretly organize fighters, but I was arrested by Jordanian intelligence, and because of my young age, which did not exceed 15 years at the time, I was placed in a reformatory in the Achrafieh area in Amman, and from there I contacted Palestinian organizations in Irbid to arrange my escape to Syria. My stay there did not last long and I then moved to southern Lebanon.
It seems that the strangeness in Youssef Al-Qutb’s life does not stop at the series of events in his life, but extends to his awards. One of his pictures won the Bronze Prize in the German Democratic Republic, but it did not bear his name, but rather bore the name of the Syrian “SANA” agency.
Regarding this story, he says, “We were sending pictures from our archive to Wafa’s headquarters in Damascus to preserve them, and I was surprised after the split that one of my pictures won the bronze award.”
In 1992, Al-Qutb won the Silver Award for childhood photographs at the 'Sixth National Festival for Amateur Film and Professional Photography' in Tabarka, Tunisia.
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