Longread: Located between Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, the Gaza Hospital was once a beacon of healthcare for Palestinians and Lebanese alike.

But then it witnessed two massacres.

Fifty years since the start of Lebanon’s Civil War, I revisit a forgotten haunt.

For Inkstick Media

Photos by João Sousa

Longread: Sisters Khijou and Samar al-Khateeb, from a Damascus suburb, have more than three years of arbitrary detention and torture between them, in Assad’s prisons. They’ve both lost loved ones to those same prisons.

Theirs is a story repeated time and again for so many Syrian women.

For Al Jazeera English

Photos by Raghed Waked

Dispatch: A week after the fall of Assad, I visited Sweida, the home province of Sultan al-Atrash, with a long history of revolt against outsiders.

For New Lines Magazine

Photos by Raghed Waked

Reportage: Among the mass exodus of people trying to flee deadly Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon are migrant domestic workers from countries such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, some of whom feel trapped and unable to get to safety.

For The New Humanitarian

Photos by João Sousa

Dispatch: Their parents grew up amid bombs, armed roadblocks, and brutal killing. Now, they are, too.

For Instick Media

Photos by João Sousa

Longread: The Hamra neighborhood’s decades-old Sudanese Club tells a tale of civil war, Malcolm X, the roaring 1960s and homesick cooks from Sudan just looking for a space of their own.

Photos by João Sousa

Longread: How climate change is slowly eroding the millennia-old profession of transhumance in a mountainous, remote corner of the Levant.

For New Lines Magazine

Photos by João Sousa

Reportage: Roise Njeri Mwaura was taking a short afternoon respite from her five-month-old son and from her daily hours of difficult cleaning work, to get her hair freshly braided at a Black-owned beauty salon in Beirut.

Suddenly: an ear-shattering boom.

For Inkstick Media

Photos by João Sousa

Reportage: Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in medieval Iraq, is always a heavy event. But for Lebanon’s Shia community, already grieving a nine-month deadly war, this year’s Ashura is a time of collective mourning.

For The New Humanitarian

Photos by João Sousa

Dispatch: Up in the mountains above Beirut, I attended one Druze community’s little-known Eid al-Adha tradition, known as Liqaa al-Eid, in which members of the town’s two clans greet one another at sunrise after a night spent in prayer.

For Inkstick Media

Photos by João Sousa

Reportage: Once a ticket to better jobs, higher pay and freedom on the open road, motorbikes are now at the center of Lebanon’s crackdown on Syrian refugees.

For Inkstick Media

Photos by João Sousa

Special series: Two teenage boys playing football. A woman living too close to recent deadly gunfights. A young woman attending Palm Sunday mass; a little girl at a playground. A woman simply standing on her roof. Some walked away with injuries, while others died of their wounds.

Here are their stories.

Photos by João Sousa

Dispatch: A mattress, an ashtray, and an Islamic calendar. It's all that surrounded Muhammad, a Syrian worker in Beirut, for days as he hid indoors from vigilante violence. He and others fear xenophobic attacks in Lebanon are worsening.

For The New Humanitarian

Photos by João Sousa

Investigation: In October 2023, a domino chain of construction failures ended with eight women crushed to death inside their own homes.

It started with a cracked column.

Photos by João Sousa

Photo story: For the 75th Nakba remembrance day, I visited the Memories Museum in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp.

It houses possessions families brought with them in 1948 — “proof that we existed on that land.”

With photos and collaboration by João Sousa

2023 Lebanon’s northernmost governorate is also its windiest. With state-supplied electricity at little more than a trickle, some Akkar residents are turning to rooftop wind turbines.

Photos by João Sousa

2023 As war broke out in Sudan, I spent a weekend with Beirut’s largely-young Sudanese residents as they struggled through erratic phone connections to check on loved ones back home.

Photos by João Sousa

2022 Each year, after the first heavy rains of autumn, people across the mountainous regions of Lebanon go into the woods to hunt for wild snails.

Photos by João Sousa

2023 The Palmyra Hotel once buzzed with celebrities like Fairouz and Nina Simone. Now it’s past its glory days, mired in state electricity cuts. The owners are banking on a possible life raft: solar power.

Photos by João Sousa

2023 Eight of the 16 confirmed Lebanese victims in the February 2023 Turkey-Syria quake were from northern Lebanon.

A month on, I visit one family in Wadi Khaled, Akkar, as their village mourns its loss.

Photos by João Sousa

2022 This year marks Lebanon’s fourth annual olive harvest since an economic crisis began spiraling out of control in late 2019. Some people are forging ahead with their own spins on a traditional craft: olive oil soap.

Photos by João Sousa

2023 Anjar, in the Bekaa Valley, is home to the descendants of Armenian genocide survivors resettled here in 1939. What is their future here amid Lebanon’s crisis?

Photos by João Sousa

2020 How was Syria’s year of pandemic, hunger and war reflected in the work of its artists and its writers? For the late, acclaimed novelist Khaled Khalifa, it raised new, urgent questions about our relationship to nature.

SyriaUntold

2020 For many residents of the isolated Rukban displacement camp, to go back into Syrian government territory, where their homes and farms now sit abandoned, is to risk military conscription or potential detainment.

Mada Masr

2019 Despite the dangers, many doctors are working under fire with limited supplies, even as more patients need help.

The New Humanitarian

2019 Smugglers tell of a newly booming black market to get desperate families out of rebel-held northwest Syria, prompted by the drastic increase in violence after a fragile ceasefire broke down.

The New Humanitarian

2020 As Syria reported its first cases of COVID-19 and aid groups warned of a potentially disastrous spread to the rebel-held northwest, people in and around Idlib province – many of whom have fled for their lives in recent months – are left waiting, saddled with a new sense of dread.

The New Humanitarian

2020 The Jordanian authorities deported dozens of Syrian refugees to a desolate camp on the Syria-Jordan border, despite deteriorating conditions and accusations from rights groups that the returns are a breach of international law.

The New Humanitarian

2019 Thousands of people are without medical care after Idlib hospital was rendered a pile of debris.

Middle East Eye

2019 Some Syrian refugees face political pressure to return and anti-refugee rhetoric, but that hasn’t taken hold in Jordan.

Here, many refugees say they are simply fed up with years spent in a dead-end job market with a bleak economic future.

The New Humanitarian