BEIRUT (AP) — Simone Camilli was a consummate storyteller — a passionate, talented newsman with an eye for detail and the ability to convey events with powerful video images that touched people around the world.
His father, Pier Luigi Camilli, the mayor of the Italian town of Pitigliano and a former journalist himself, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera: "He had this work in his blood."
Simone Camilli's death came at the peak of a thriving career full of promise.
He covered major stories across Europe, including the independence of Kosovo, the war in Georgia and the arrest of Bosnian Serb military leader Radko Mladic. He also had assignments in some of the world's most violent conflict zones in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
"Simone was well known throughout Europe, and especially to our video team in London, where his death has hit AP deeply," Gary Pruitt, the AP's chief executive, said in a memo to the staff.
He was a welcome face in Gaza and loved the story so much that he recently turned down an assignment in Iraq to cover the seaside strip, said Najib Jobain, the AP's chief producer in Gaza. He said Camilli was like a brother.
"He was so happy to be with me working in Gaza," Jobain said. "He was asked, 'Do you want to go to Irbil or Gaza?' He said, 'I'll go to Gaza.'"
"Simone was largely self-taught in the visual sense, and whenever I was faced with some tricky problem that with 30 years of professional experience I couldn't solve, he was my go-to guy in editing and image manipulation," he said.
His work had "an incredible eye for detail and was able to personalize stories and portray human drama," said Tomislav Skaro, the AP's Middle East regional editor for video.
Camilli's pieces in Gaza told "the narrative of a destroyed Strip trying to get back to life," Skaro said.
Camilli is survived by a longtime partner and a 3-year-old daughter in Beirut, as well as his parents and two sisters.
The day before he left Beirut for Jerusalem and what would be his final assignment in Gaza, Camilli spoke happily over coffee about visiting his father during a recent vacation in Pitigliano, a Tuscan town of about 4,000 people between Florence and Rome.
Diaa Hadid, a longtime colleague who worked with Camilli most recently in Irbil, Iraq, described him as "warm, lovely, funny."
"I can't think of the past tense and Simone," she said.