Rizek Abdel Jawad is a Palestinian photojournalist based in Gaza City who has been documenting life in the Gaza Strip, and he has frequently contributed his photo essays to the NB Media Co-op. He lives in a displacement camp with his wife and three young children. His dispatches reach New Brunswick anyway, filed from a place where the sky, as he once put it, "became a gate that never closes on missiles." On Oct. 21, a selection of his photographs will be set up outdoors near the Peace Garden on the Church Street side of Central United Church at 150 Queen Street in Moncton, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. There is no admission fee.
The exhibition is organized by Citizens for Peace-Greater Moncton and the NB Media Co-op, the volunteer, not-for-profit news co-operative that has published Abdel Jawad's photo essays regularly. Between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., speakers will offer personal testimonies. If the weather turns, the whole thing moves to Oct. 28 at the same time and place. Donations for Abdel Jawad's family will be accepted.
The pairing is less unlikely than it first looks. The NB Media Co-op was formed in 2009, after a New Brunswick Social Forum in Fredericton the year before drew 200 people under the banner "Another New Brunswick and World are Possible." Its founders chose the co-operative model deliberately, aiming to report on people "ignored or misrepresented in our corporate media" without advertisers or state funding. Publishing a photographer inside Gaza fits that mandate almost too neatly: a story that would otherwise go unseen, carried by someone with no institutional backing on either end of the line.
Abdel Jawad's work for the co-op is not abstract. A recent dispatch, published Oct. 13, shows Dr. Mahmoud Al-Hajj Ahmed, 37, treating patients inside a tent in the Beit Lahia area, roughly 60 metres from the "yellow line" marking where Israeli forces withdrew during the first phase of the ceasefire agreement. The clinic lacks most medical supplies because of Israel's ongoing restrictions, so patients often buy their own supplies from pharmacies before coming to be treated. Another piece, published in July to mark 1,000 days of the war, is a first-person essay in which Abdel Jawad writes that the war "targets not just people, but memory, language, homes, names, and everything that proves life once existed here." His text is written in Arabic and translated into English with editorial support from the co-op.
The event's framing is blunt about the stakes. The co-op's listing says the war has claimed more than 74,000 lives, almost a third of them children, and that although a ceasefire has been on paper for a year, the death toll continues to mount. It also notes the risk of simply doing this work: about 200 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Abdel Jawad is part of the Connecting Gaza initiative, which channels donations directly to families in the territory.
Citizens for Peace-Greater Moncton has been the local engine behind this kind of programming. The group was founded by Mohamed Ali, who spoke at a Sackville ceasefire rally in November 2023, telling the crowd he felt "a lot of pain and a lot of sorrow" watching images of suffering from Gaza. This past May, Citizens for Peace joined Labour for Palestine Menahkwesk/Saint John, the Palestine Solidarity Committee of Saint John, New Brunswickers for Justice & Peace for Palestine and Independent Jewish Voices-New Brunswick for a Nakba Day rally that began at Moncton city hall, marched through downtown and ended at Central United Church for a film screening. The church, a Gothic Revival building on Queen Street just west of Church Street, is designated a local historic place; it has become a recurring host for the city's Palestine solidarity events.
That history gives the Oct. 21 exhibition a particular shape. It is not a gallery show with a guest book and an opening reception. It is a set of photographs pinned up outside a church, on a sidewalk, for two hours on a Wednesday, free to anyone walking past. The testimonies in the middle of the lunch hour are the only scheduled part. The rest is the older, simpler proposition of bearing witness: someone in Gaza took the picture, someone in Moncton printed it, and the public is invited to stand in front of it.
Abdel Jawad has described the work in terms of what it is up against. In his 1,000-day essay, he wrote of neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, of roads that "once connected people now separate them," and of tents that were meant to be temporary becoming "entire cities of fabric." Photographing that, and sending it out, is a way of insisting the place still exists. For two hours on Queen Street, that insistence has a physical address.
The exhibition runs Oct. 21, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. outside Central United Church, 150 Queen Street, Moncton, near the Peace Garden on the Church Street side. Speakers give testimonies from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Rain date is Oct. 28, same time and location. Free; donations for Abdel Jawad's family accepted.