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zeashan

@zeashanashraf

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photographer from kerala
london
♡ @zeashan.jpg

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On October 9, 2023, Refaat Alareer sent this dispatch, “It’s unspeakable brutalities. There’s a bomb every couple of minutes. Whole buildings are being destroyed. Almost all the roads to al-Shifa Hospital were destroyed. So many families[…]

You don’t know whether this is, this is it. We don’t deserve this. We’re not animals like the Isr—lis think. Our kids deserve better. Isr—l knows that they want to punish the kids, the civilians. And I have always said this, even before, even from the nineties when young Palestinians praised those valiant fighters. They are to be praised. But if you know them in real life, when you see the pictures of those fighters, they’re very simple people. They’re lightly armed, modestly trained, but they have a weapon that Isr—l does not have: the weapon of the belief, the faith, that this is your land, that you are fighting a brutal European colonial enterprise that has been brutalizing Palestinians for over seven decades[…]

They’re fighting for a cause that is just, a cause that should not and cannot be forsaken. We believe that if we give up, then everybody is going to say: ‘Look at the Palestinians. They give up. Why don’t you behave like the Palestinians? Why don’t you bow down?’ And Isr—l knows this.”

pictures from yesterday’s national demonstration in central london, marking three years ongoing… taken in London Embankment by @zeashanashraf

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8 days ago

loveddd making these portraits of @raayya in her london studio 🍂

raya kassisieh, photographed for the summer 2026 cover of naso art journal, issue 3
@naso_artjournal taken in London by @zeashanashraf

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24 days ago

London-based photographer Zeashan Ashraf has been documenting the solidarity movement for Palestine since October 2023, photographing thousands of people across the UK who have come together, again and again, to reclaim public spaces and imperial sites in order to call for an end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine and the British government's involvement in it.

In this photo essay, Ashraf shares images he has taken of various protest sites, encampments, and acts of solidarity across the country, while reflecting on his experiences of witnessing and recording these vital historical moments that are still underreported and maligned in mainstream media.

Read the full essay and see more of Zeashan's work at the link in bio.

This piece is commissioned in tandem with our latest issue, Wasafiri 127: Solidarities, available to order now.

@zeashanashraf #londonprotests #encampments #protestart #documentaryphotography #palestinesolidarity Photo of people marching in a street carrying Palestinian flags. Underneath text reads: A Time Like This: Photographing Solidarity Movements for Palestine in the UK by Zeashan Ashraf. by @zeashanashraf

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a month ago

mohammed el-kurd in london

photos from last week’s uk launch of his book,
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. hosted by yasmin el-rifae for palestine festival of literature

@mohammedelkurd @yelrifae @palfest @earthackney by @zeashanashraf

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a month ago

the annihilation continues, and we are about to have yet another prime minister who cannot bring himself to call it what it is. we joined the national march today in london to spell it out for his new (same) government. pictures from this afternoon.

also sharing this extract from Abdaljawad Omar‘s new and extremely relevant essay on @equatormagazine, Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity:

“Two years on, this grotesque convergence – total narrative victory coexisting with the unhindered erasure of Palestinian life – reveals that the issue was never a lack of facts or a failure of empathy. The reality of Palestine induces a special form of disavowal, because its implications threaten too much of what the West believes about itself.

To truly accept what is happening in Palestine requires acknowledging that the international order is a fiction, and that Western prosperity remains tethered to a brutal, selective inhumanity. Confronted with a truth that would shatter their own moral and ideological self-conception, Western liberals retreat into moral paralysis: they validate the trauma and permit the g—cide to continue anyway.” taken in Holborn by @zeashanashraf

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3 months ago

what solidarity looks like taken in Whitehall, Westminster by @zeashanashraf

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2 years ago

in our thousands, in our millions. A wide angle photo of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus, London, where atop the fountain are several young people waving the flag of Pal. taken in London by @zeashanashraf

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3 years ago

“When the sound of bombs, bullets, and fighter jets finally fades, if only for a breath of time, a mother still cannot hear the voices of her children running toward her in joy. Because Isr**l m*rdered them. When the streets are declared “safe,” a father will walk them alone, his footsteps echoing through the silence of an emptied world. Because Isr**l m*rdered them. When people cry out in relief, the orphans will have no one to embrace. Because Isr**l m*rdered them. The morning chorus of children singing the national anthem before school has vanished. Because Isr**l destroyed the classrooms and m*rdered the students.

The wind drifts through shattered walls, unable to carry the call to prayer from the mosque, silenced for months. Because Isr**l destroyed it. The journalist who was meant to announce the ceasefire is gone. Because Isr**l m*rdered him. The family that once gathered every Thursday evening, where the grandfather held the little ones and the cousins laughed beneath the soft hum of conversation, is gone. Because Isr**l exterminated them. A weary cat stands upon a mound of ruins, in the neighborhood where it once leapt from roof to roof. It stares into the dust, unable to recognise what was once its home. Because Isr**l destroyed it. A survivor searches for the grave of a loved one, but the earth has been leveled flat. There is no place left to mourn. Because Isr**l bulldozed the cemetery.

And when the bombing stops, the real battle begins. War shapes the body to endure, but the soul breaks when the noise dissolves. In the silence, people begin to count the absences. The beloved faces they once saw are no more. The street vendor who sold figs and grapes is no more. The stray animals that wandered between the stalls are no more. The woman calling her son from the balcony is no more. The old men sipping coffee under the tree that shielded them from the sun are no more. So much is no more…” — @SakirKhader by @zeashanashraf

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a year ago

day 700. we marched yet again today in london, on the 30th national demonstration. and i’m reminding myself of el-kurd’s epilogue, on the myth of colonial invincibility:

“…that liberation is attainable, (and) the future is within reach. Amid the unrelenting airstrikes and the havoc of demolished cities, it might seem frivolous to fixate on the blossoming jasmine. But we owe it ourselves to look at everything, to look for everything. To see the picture with all of its details. As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nаƙᑲa will not last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution. On the phone, my mother tells me, rain is coming and God is almighty” (Mohammed El Kurd @mohammedelkurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal) by @zeashanashraf

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a year ago

liberate collective imagination by @zeashanashraf

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2 years ago

these pictures are from today’s national demonstration in london, today is also the international day of solidarity with p a l e s t i n e.

“And so here we are, with what we have determined is bearable: this is the world we have made.“ — Sana Saeed (@sanaface). extracts from her recent and devastating piece https://open.substack.com/pub/sanasaeed/p/the-age-of-slaughtering-children by @zeashanashraf

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a year ago

“Here we are, on different planets, in different realities. Statements that include “should” or “must” run the risk of being disparaging and short-sighted. Yet I cannot help but think that this consequential moment calls on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible, that it demands that we renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth, unflinchingly, unabashedly, cleverly, no matter in what conference room, no matter in whose face. Such bravery is asked of us now, not when gardens grow over our martyrs graves, not when the debris is swept up and sculpted into memorials, and not when the bloodied press vests of our fallen journalists rest eternally in shadow boxes. Those of us with platforms, with some level of protection, with some social capital or actual capital, must dare to shift culture and not only talk about the necessity of shifting culture. Because G a z a cannot fight the empire on its own. Or, to use an embittered proverb my grandmother used to mutter at the evening news, “They asked the Pharaoh, Who made you a pharaoh? He replied, ‘No one stopped me.’””
— Mohammed El-Kurd @mohammedelkurd, Perfect Victims And The Politics Of Appeal taken in London, United Kingdom by @zeashanashraf

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9 months ago