“What is this? Are you scared of your account getting locked or something?” Shireen asked rhetorically. “I think it's cowardice to be like, ‘I have all these privileges, and I'm not going to risk them at all.’”

Shireen has been photographing social justice movements since 2018. Her main subject has been Palestinian protests. Since October 2023, she estimates she’s attended between 10-15 protests throughout the Greater Toronto Area, including the student encampment at the University of Toronto.

The Palestinian protests across Canada overwhelmingly have the same requests: a divestment from Israeli military weapons, ending the occupation of Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and an immediate ceasefire. The protests also aim to draw attention to the number of deaths caused by the military against Palestinian children, as demonstrated in data published by the Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME). Speeches from Palestinian refugees have been prominent at the protests, according to Shireen.

Shireen described often feeling shocked at the content she would hear during speeches, as people would describe the number of bombs being dropped by the Israeli military into the Gaza Strip.

“They said Israel's bombed more people than Hiroshima,” she described, explaining that some protesters came prepared with bar graphs and data about the bombings.

The statement that the Israeli bombing in Gaza has been more deadly than the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan during World War II was first stated by third-party organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (EMHRM) in November 2023, just one month after the war officially began. In the last year, the statement has gone viral.

The EMHRM, a Geneva-based human rights organization, released a statement saying the Israeli army has bombed “over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual.” Data shows that the Hiroshima bomb detonated with the equivalent of 15,000 tons of dynamite. The EMHRM cited Israeli War Minister Yoav Gallant as their source: Gallant has been documented declaring over 10,000 bombs have been dropped in Gaza, releasing 25,000 tons of explosives within the first two months of the war. Photos captured by freelance photographers living in the area have regularly documented the destruction, despite threats of censorship.

Journalists and photographers face huge amounts of censorship in Gaza, even on the rare occasions that the Israeli military allows them to pass through the checkpoints. Reporters Without Borders has highly criticized the overwhelming number of times journalists have been denied entry into Gaza at the Rafah crossing — the sole land connection between Gaza and the rest of the world. When journalists are banned, overhead satellite technology has shown continuous amounts of destruction, even in so-called safe zones. The technology used to document natural disasters from space is now being used to document the widespread rubble throughout the Gaza Strip, according to a report from CBC News.

Media censorship doesn’t just mean that journalists are barred from entering the occupied Palestinian territories. It also means that within the State of Israel, journalists are having more and more difficulties in reporting the government’s military siege.