Ben Ehrenreich

Since​ last summer, on the 24th of every month, Marisa Amaro and Maite Echarte have driven up to the fence around the Spanish enclave of Melilla on Morocco’s northern coast to tie bunches of flowers onto the steel mesh outside the Barrio Chino border crossing. Amaro and Echarte, who work assisting asylum seekers in Melilla, are usually alone there. The crossing itself has been closed...

In Haro Sheikh​ the journalists kneeled to photograph a tortoise. It was nearly a metre long, with short, spikily scaled legs tucked beneath its shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth around it. Beside it was the carcass of a donkey, white bone showing beneath what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village...

I was​ surprised a few weeks ago to find everyone I knew in Hebron feeling cheerful. Perhaps it was the weather. Four months had passed since my last visit to the city, the largest, and lately the bloodiest, in the West Bank. It was January then, and cold, and everyone had seemed distant and shaky, glassy-eyed with trauma. The previous November, most of the neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida...

Baraa Halabieh​ could recall almost every detail of the long journey from his family home in the Syrian city of Hama: every bus and taxi fare, where he slept or failed to sleep each night, how many hours he walked to cross each border and how long he stood crammed on a stationary train waiting to pass into Hungary. He remembered the friend of a friend who stole all his money in Turkey and...