DONBASS, GAZA AND SYRIA COVERAGE WIN RT’S 2023 INTERNATIONAL AWARDS FOR WAR JOURNALISTS
MOSCOW, DECEMBER 22, 2023 — The jury of the 2023 Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards, given to the best journalistic works from conflict zones, has announced its winners. This year, the awards went to war correspondents from Palestine, Russia, Syria and Argentina. RT established the award in memory of Khaled Alkhateb, an RT Arabic freelance journalist who died in Syria in 2017.
The 2023 Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards has four nominations: Best Video Journalism From A Conflict Zone, Best Written Journalism From A Conflict Zone, Best Humanitarian Video Journalism, and Best Humanitarian Written Journalism, contested by journalistic works in six languages from 14 countries.
THE WINNERS:
1. BEST VIDEO JOURNALISM FROM A CONFLICT ZONE.
— Ghazi Al-Aloul (Gaza, Palestine), Gaza. Сonsequences, Roya TV (Jordan).
In this series of reports from Gaza, which continues to suffer bombings by the Israeli army, the author profiles the deaths of reporters covering the events, the work of hospitals amid hostilities, and the lives of refugees.
2. BEST WRITTEN JOURNALISM FROM A CONFLICT ZONE.
— Sergei Prudnikov, A Series of Reports from Donbass, Izvestia newspaper (Russia).
A series of reports on the life of frontline towns in the Donetsk People’s Republic in mid-2022. The author portrays the consequences of one of the most savage shellings of Donetsk by the Ukrainian army, the return to relative calm in Volnovakha, where the fighting had just ended, and the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol.
3. BEST HUMANITARIAN VIDEO JOURNALISM.
— Sebastian Salgado, Freedom Tango in Lugansk, Data Urgente (Argentina).
To shoot this documentary series, the Argentinian journalist went in August 2022 to the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. The series centers on stories of local residents and how the frontline region is now recovering after the hostilities.
4. BEST HUMANITARIAN WRITTEN JOURNALISM.
— Sara Salloum (Syria), The guns fell silent…, Al Mayadeen English (Lebanon).
In this series of articles on post-war life in some regions of Syria, Sara Salloum talks about the humanitarian crisis due to lack of water and food, growing child labor exploitation, and the danger posed by uncleared landmines.
This year, the Awards jury includes VGTRK war correspondent Evgeny Poddubny; Ahmed Gomma, Editor-in-Chief of Youm7 newspaper (Egypt); Amro Abdelhamid, main presenter at the inter-Arabic TV channel Al Ghad; Muhammad Ballout, Lebanese war correspondent and Coordinator of the Thinking and Policy Analysis Unit at the Center for Arab Unity Studies; and Ayanda Hollow, president of TV BRICS Africa. The jury also included RT correspondents Salam Musafir (RT Arabic), Semyon Senderov (RT Spanish), and Thomas Roeper (RT DE).
Over the previous years, the Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards went to journalists from Russia, Iraq, Ireland, Singapore, the United States, Italy, Syria, and Yemen.
The Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards were established by RT in memory of 25-year-old RT Arabic freelance correspondent Khaled Alkhateb who was killed by ISIS shelling in Homs, Syria, in 2017. Khaled had been covering the fighting between Syrian government forces and terrorists.
