Desconcertante essa foto

Desconcertante essa foto

Originally shared by Mike Wood

A sea of starving humanity.
This is in the refugee camp in the Syrian city of Yarmouk during a UN food distribution. When this breathtaking image was released yesterday, some said it was photoshopped. In response,   Christopher Gunness of UNRWA says this:

"I categorically deny that the now iconic image of an UNRWA food distribution in Yarmoouk Camp, Damascus at the end of January has been "photoshopped" or tampered with in any way. It is entirely authentic. We are a humanitarian agency and can only be as effective as we have been in delivering aid in such complex circumstances by meticulously safeguarding our neutrality. When you work in war zones as UNRWA has done since for over six decades, the "neutrality instinct" is second nature. At the same time, we have a mandated obligation to protect our beneficiaries. Protection is a big word with many facets. We protect by delivering services such as food aid and health care. But we also protect by advocacy; neutral humanitarian advocacy in which we simply bear witness to profound and tragic human suffering, objectively and impartially; and we in UNRWA have learnt through long and varied experience that advocacy is most powerful when you don't enter into politics. As for the iconographic power of these images, that really is beyond our control. When an image combines a mixture of truth and even beauty and humanity; when an image embodies the collective conscience of its time in a manner that is at once universally epic and deeply personal, it takes on a transformative power of its own. It speaks a collective human language summing up a moment in history. It is above politics and policy. It is something incalculable to the point of miraculous. That is what happened with this iconic image of UNRWA's food distribution in Yarmouk at the end January 2014."

Daily Mail has this and many other images here:  http://goo.gl/fGf387

Image is (C) AFP/Getty and not my image.
#Syria   #syrian_crisis   #syriancivilwar   #Yarmouk   #yarmouk_camp