Gaza Genocide
2023 - 2024

A modern day holocaust is being carried out against the people of Gaza, which is still continuing after 400+ days.

The “Calm” Before The Storm
The Fall of 2023 in Palestine marked 30 years of when the Oslo Accords were originally signed, but Palestinians were still stuck under a 75-year-long occupation and things had gotten worse as a result of that failure.

In the West Bank, attacks continued and Palestinians remained unsafe. The apartheid wall and military checkpoints made life more difficult and miserable. While settlements in Gaza had been removed in 2005, they only continued to increase in the West Bank.

Gaza had been under siege and blockade for over 15 years. The UN and Human Rights Watch declared Gaza as an open-air prison. Yet nothing they could do to try to change that was seen acceptable or a path to a solution of independence.

Peaceful protests were attempted, most notably with the start of the Great March of Return in particular, and were only met with violence from Israeli Occupation Forces. Diplomacy was attempted by Hamas, to no avail.

With the normalization of the Abraham Accords, Gaza was essentially being told they were going to continue to subjugated. It was a dead issue, there was no long term future planning.

That all changed in October 2023.

Al-Aqsa Flood
This all led up to the Al-Aqsa Flood mission on October 7, 2023 – led by Hamas’ military group, Al-Qassam Brigades – to confront the Gaza Division of the Israeli military.

Hamas wanted to return the Palestinian cause to the forefront and re-establish their people’s rightful demands for their own state, freedom, and future. “We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation,” said senior Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk told The New Yorker.

The Israeli Occupation Forces are equipped with endless more resources of technology, weapons, and money. But this operation, planned by a very tight-knit group of Hamas and Al-Qassam top members, took advantage of discovered vulnerabilities in Israeli surveillance systems and perimeter defenses.

The overall goal was to breach the wall and capture Israeli soldiers, bring them to Gaza, and put pressure on an exchange deal for all the Palestinians political prisoners (which at the time were around 6,000). After all, Yahya Sinwar – reportedly a leader of planning Al-Aqsa Flood – was himself released in a prisoner exchange deal. Back in 2011, there over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier. Sinwar, who had been in prison for 22 years, was one of them.

Despite Israeli security reportedly being internally warned about an upcoming operation, they disregarded what was on the horizon.

Over a thousand Al-Qassam fighters in Gaza initially gathered at assembly points at 6:00am on the morning of October 7, but none had details about the operation beforehand. At 6:30am, there were 5,000 rockets launched – more in half an hour than they fired during the entire 2014 war. The intention was to push soldiers and civilians back into their safe rooms, under the threat of those rockets.

Drones were also sent to take down IOF communications through their electromagnetic spectrum so that each of the military bases couldn’t know what was happening at the other. At the same time, resistance fighters broke through the iron wall that blocked Gaza from “Israel” – with many different breaches along the wall. Paragliders also flew in under the rockets.

Immediately after getting through the wall, resistance fighters went to take over the military bases of the IOF’s Gaza Division during the upcoming hours. Those bases also had a skeleton crews on that day, which happened to be a holiday. Al-Qassam was successful in capturing all commanders of IOF’s Southern brigade immediately. The Erez checkpoint was also stormed right away. Overall, Israeli military bases were completely unprepared for the operation.

They did not plan for it to have been as easy in getting through the border without a fight. Once word quickly got out of the operation, it didn’t take long for additional fighters from other factions – like from Palestinian Islamic Jihad – to join as well.

As this was an unannounced operation, even within Al-Qassam, Hamas could only control the mission of their own military wing. This added to more activity than they expected, including entering settlements that were further away. Other civilians or factions made their own decisions, which including some looting and additional hostage-taking.

It’s clear that the unexpected scale of ability to go back into the ‘48 territories on that day was a surprise to Hamas, and they were only able to focus on their objectives. Hamas said that “if there was any case of targeting civilians, it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.” Al-Qassam’s mission was to target IOF soldiers and military points, to inflict a defeat on the army of their colonizers, and to work out an immediate exchange deal.

The area near the Gaza border was mostly surrounded by these bases and settlements, but three miles away from the Gaza border there was also a music event happening that Hamas was not previously aware of. When the operation happened in the early morning hours, the Nova festival was still ongoing. Israeli settlers attending ran away when they realized what was happening. Some were taken hostage, while others were killed. Yet is often not acknowledged that many of the deaths from this, and in general on that day, were by their own country.

During October 7, as the Israeli military was caught by surprise and struggling to reclaim their imposed security grip, they are said to have implemented a specific protocol.

Known as the Hannibal Directive, it declares the IOF would prefer a soldier (or in this case, a civilian as well) to be killed rather than taken hostage.

On that day, Israeli apache helicopters fired recklessly at many people, not being able to tell who was who, and merkava tanks shelled the homes in the kibuttz settlements.

While it is still not acknowledged by most of the mainstream Western media to this day, independent outlets like The Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss have been reporting on this since early on. There were indeed Israeli casualties, that is not denied, but a quarter of the current 1,189 figure were security forces and many of the other 796 were seemingly killed through the Hannibal Directive.

Lies about the actions of that day – such as there being 40 beheaded babies or claims of mass sexual violence – have no evidence and been repeatedly debunked.

Al Jazeera also released a documentary on YouTube in March 2024, simply titled October 7, that goes through a timeline and much footage of the day to lay out many of the events that happened.

“Israel” and the West have aimed to present Hamas’ actions on October 7 as that of monsters, instead of a planned military operation of oppressed people living in an open air prison under the control of a settler-colonial, apartheid state that had stolen their land, crushed their rights, injured and martyred their people, and carried out decades of constant crimes.

In a Drop Site News profile on Hamas leadership around the decisions of the operation, one person who they spoke with was Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’ political bureau and former government minister. Naim says they took lessons from history – such as with Vietnam, Somalia, South Africa, and Algeria – observing that fights for liberation did not end by peaceful NGOs or the oppressor suddenly deciding to leave. You had to fight back, or be left to pay the price. It was a seen as a righteous rebellion against an occupation force, one which had imposed collective punishment on Gaza’s civilians.

It took the IOF multiple days to get back the Gaza envelope and have it under their self-proclaimed control again. There was no denying the Al-Aqsa Flood as an anti-colonial revolt was a failure for Israeli forces to protect their own perimeter.

In the aftermath, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and the many others in power – decided to seek endless revenge.

The Endless & Ruthless Reaction
Within the first days after October 7, Hamas put out offers to to work out a deal right away for the Israeli hostages. However, these discussions were rejected by the Israeli government and military, who would later make it clear that those hostages taken were never a true priority. The attacks started right away on Gaza, the very same day martyring hundreds of Palestinians in airstrikes.

Quickly, there was verbal expression of genocidal intent. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9: "We are imposing a complete siege on the city of Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

He’s just one of many members of the government, army, and public figures making statements declaring their goals against Palestinians to starve, ethnically cleanse, and make them incessantly suffer. Law for Palestine collected over 500 examples by January 2024 alone.

One notable early attack was on October 17, 2023, when the IOF attacked Al Alhi Baptist Hospital in central Gaza, which was sheltering many displaced Palestinians already. Around 500 were martyred and several hundred more wounded. Yet as Israel blamed it on resistance forces, claiming it was a missile that misfired from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Western media ran with it and tried to obfuscate the horrific act.

Since then, despite clear evidence of perpetration, the IOF has received continued cover from both Western media and governments as they commit war crimes – including against a large majority of the hospital system, which also has no supplies able to enter and have been severely limited in their capacity.

Forensic Architecture is a research group who “uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.” On October 25, 2024, they released an 827-page report that details their data collection of IOF operations in Gaza since the genocide began.

They have picked out patterns from these attacks, which comprise of the following categories:

“Spatial Control – the physical shaping of Gaza according by a strategic design;

Displacement – the repeated, forced displacement of civilians and an assessment of Israel’s ‘humanitarian measures’;

Destruction of Agriculture and Water Resources – the destruction of fields, orchards, greenhouses, agricultural and water infrastructure;

Destruction of Medical Infrastructure – the systematic targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers;

Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure – the targeting of public utilities, roads, schools including those acting as shelters, religious buildings, and government buildings;

Targeting of Aid – the systematic targeting of infrastructure and personnel necessary for the transport and distribution of humanitarian aid and the preparation of food.”

Forensic Architecture’s findings across these fields were summed up in an article on their website. It’s worth keeping in mind that no amount of data, no matter how expansive in data or areas of coverage, can come even come close to covering the scale of destruction and inhumanity on Palestinians in Gaza.

To describe all of the atrocities of Israel’s genocide on Gaza so far would require a whole website, and even then it would be insufficient. The IOF has inhumanely destroyed all semblance of life in the Strip, continuously blocked aid from coming in, targeted journalists, destroyed all the universities, most of the buildings and roads demolished, closed the border crossings for medical evacuations, targeted civil defense workers in addition to healthcare professionals, bombed UNRWA schools sheltering displaced refugees, and a never-ending list of war crimes.

In addition to the media, the governments of Western countries – such as the US, UK, Germany, France, and more – have provided endless funding and diplomatic cover for the genocide during this time.

In early July 2024, the oldest medical journal in the world, The Lancet (founded 1823), conservatively estimated that there were around 186,000 martyrs in Gaza. Things have only gotten worse since then. It’s an impossible task to truly keep track of all those killed, from unidentified people who lay under the rubble to those who are simply unidentifiable, or whose bodies have just disappeared into thin air after an attack.

In addition to the martyrs, there are the hundreds of thousands wounded – including a large amount of amputees – who have been deprived of medical supplies for even basic treatment.

The grave health effects this will leave on people in Gaza and the environment can only begin to be understood now, let alone when the dust first settles. It feels foolish to even attempt to describe all of the devastation, as the vastness is unquantifiable.

Endless examples of this genocide have been livestreamed to our phones, despite the targeting of journalists and difficulty for power and electricity. There has arguably never been such a proliferation of evidence available to the masses every day and yet both government leaders and regular citizens who claim to care about human rights have no concern for all of the horror stories showcased of this daily Gaza reality.

Each day that passes without a stop is harmful to the remaining Palestinians, as well as the legacy of the martyrs.

As Palestinian lawyer, public speaker, and This Is Palestine podcast host Diana Buttu has repeatedly said in conversation recently, we are told “nothing justified October 7th, but October 7th justifies everything.”

There is no red line for Israel’s “right to self-defense” that Western leaders proclaim, as they pretend to express sympathy for those in Gaza while continuing to send the weapons and political cover to kill them.

Hamas is labeled by these same people as “terrorists” and every airstrike on hospitals, refugee school shelters, bakeries, and more are all excused by the IOF saying that it’s a Hamas operating base without any evidence. International law has been broken hundreds if not thousands of times, but just mention the word “Hamas” and they’re a scapegoat.

The racism of this labeling has played into the lack of action and condemnation from large swaths of the general public to refuse this designation. However, large percentages of Arabs and Muslims – as well as the younger generations – recognize the truth.

As Jadaliyya co-editors wrote in a joint statement at the first year mark of October 7:

“A year into this genocide, the learning curve when it comes to understanding Palestine as a liberation struggle remains steep. Similarly, far too many refuse to see Hamas as a sociopolitical phenomenon integral to Palestinian society and politics, now and in the future.

This failure to understand Palestine as a site of anti-colonial struggle makes it impossible, even for those who might feel some ‘sympathy,’ to effectively resist the statist logics and justifications of counter-terrorism… armed struggle is a right of colonized peoples and the liberation of Palestine requires multiple forms of resistance, armed and otherwise.

History has shown that the logic of Zionism and the policies of successive Israeli governments is to obtain the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum number of Palestinian people. Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs have the right to self-defense and to realize self-determination. Israel and the US fully understand that the Hamas attack sought to shatter the status quo, and have responded with a determination and ferocity that shed all pretenses of proportionality.”

Artists Under Genocide
Less than a week after October 7, 2023, Heba Zagout was the first known Palestinian artist to be martyred in the genocide, with her home hit by an Israeli airstrike. She was 39-years-old and had been born in the Bureij refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

Zagout was a mother of four children, two of whom were martyred at the same time. She had been an art teacher and worked with UNRWA, while continuing to make her own paintings for personal work.

Her sister, Maysaa – also an artist – has also been in Gaza, and is thankfully still alive. (You can find a list of Gaza-based artists who are raising money, including Maysaa, through a list of GoFundMe campaigns on the Donate for Gaza page of this website.)

Another notable artist martyred during this time is Fathi Ghaben, who passed away in February 2024 while suffering from chronic chest and lung illness in Gaza, seeking medical treatment. His calls to evacuate were denied. Fellow artist and friend Sliman Mansour wrote a tribute on Instagram:

“The artist Fathi Ghaben died this morning while waiting for the occupation authorities to allow him to travel for treatment abroad.

Fathi was born in the village of Harbiyya in 1947 and was forcibly displaced with his family to Gaza, where they lived in the Jabalia refugee camp. He learned art by doing, and in the seventies and eighties of the last century, he became one of the most essential artists in Gaza through his expression in his paintings of nostalgia for Palestine before the Nakba and his drawings about identity and liberation.

He was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for drawing the Palestinian flag in 1984. Fathi was a unique, funny, and generous personality who loved life and left his mark on Palestinian art. He enjoyed great public popularity. May God have mercy on him, and our deepest heartfelt condolences to his family, the artists of Gaza and Palestine, and to all who knew and loved him.”

Mansour also spoke about him in a feature on Savior Flair, where he also painted a portrait of Ghaben as a tribute.

On October 18, 2024, after a year of genocide, 32-year-old digital illustrator Mahasen Al-Khateeb was another artist martyred from Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia refugee camp. This was during a heightened siege on Jabalia and all of the North that started that month.

Khateeb had previously worked for a decade prior with international companies in motion graphics, specializing in character design and storyboarding. In a profile on The Electronic Intifada, she is described as “a prominent figure in Gaza’s digital art scene, captivating both children and adults” who had opened her own office with her life savings before the genocide. She also taught and mentored others.

Her office and their family’s home were then destroyed after October 2023 and her father had passed, leaving her as the main provider for the family. They were all reported as martyred in the attack. But she refused to flee south and became a voice for the people of northern Gaza, telling the stories of those around her, capturing moments of both joy and pain. This included interviewing everyone from doctors to street vendors to journalists.

Khateeb’s last drawing was of Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year-old who was still connected to an IV when he was engulfed in flames after an IOF airstrike on tents for displaced refugees by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Outside of individuals, Israel has destroyed art spaces – just like they have mosques, universities, and more.

In December 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted and destroyed Eltiqa Gallery in downtown Gaza City in the North. It had been founded in 2002 by a handful of Palestinian artists across different mediums. Eltiqa held exhibitions, workshops, and provided art education.

In April 2024, they also destroyed Gaza’s last contemporary art space. The Shababeek (“Windows”) for Contemporary Art – a nonprofit arts education center and gallery – had previously helped the community in several ways. As co-founder Shareef Sarhan told Hyperallergic, they gave artist grants, hosted residencies and exhibitions, taught university students about different types of media, and created public art programming across Gaza.

Unfortunately, these kinds of attacks on cultural spaces were not new.

For those artists still alive in Gaza, most have been displaced many times and they have primarily had to focus on survival like everyone else. In addition, supplies that were already difficult to get before have become nearly impossible.

However, some artists have found an outlet in continuing to make work.

Maisara Baroud is one Palestinian artist in Gaza who has worked on daily drawings, luckily able to have access to ink and paper to capture the life under daily attacks and uncertainty.

One of Baroud’s illustrations was also used on the opening cover page of a 300-page report by Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, detailing their research into the genocide over the nine months from October 2023 - July 2024. The report explores the mass violations of international law, intent laid out, the targeting of civilians, deadly patterns, and more.

One painter, 38-year-old Palestinian artist Maysaa Youssef, has continued amidst the rubble and destruction after IOF shelling of her home.

Others, like 17-year-old Hussain Al Jerjawi, have taken to truly using whatever they have, such as working on UNRWA flour bags.

Another example is a young girl named Sarah who was displaced from Beit Lahia to Gaza City, with no materials left. Instead she found charcoal to use and drew on their tent.

These are just some of the many examples, like 20-year-old Nur Al Rimlawi who drew in her invalid PA passport of all the places she wants to go.

Graffiti of different kinds on the buildings still standing, or just among the rubble, has also been another form of expression.

Palestinian Artists Outside of Gaza
As a Palestinian artist of the newer generation who was born in 1999 into a post-Oslo world, Malak Mattar had found an outlet in art following the 2014 war on Gaza. After, she continued to create and found an audience through social media. In Spring 2023, Mattar had been accepted into the prestigious Central Saint Martins school at the University of the Arts London for the Fall semester.

While not everyone had a chance to leave Gaza for their studies due to the siege, she was able to eventually make it out – though not before Israeli authorities impeded her ability to travel, missing the first month of her course. When Mattar eventually arrived in London on October 6, 2023, little did she know how history would change for her home on the very next day.

Since then, she has not been able to go back to Gaza again. This led to feeling artistically paralyzed from creating while she saw the genocide unfold in the first couple of months. After a couple of months, this turned into many sketches of martyrs on brown paper.

After accepting an artist residency in London to start 2024, Mattar chose to focus on one giant piece – her largest painting to date at roughly 7 x 16 feet. This became No Words, a compilation of scenes from the genocide. Notably, Mattar was an artist who had previously been drawn to bright colors. This piece, however, was limited to black-and-white.

Since then, Mattar has presented the painting in exhibits in several countries – saying that since the atrocities are still happening, the best time to be showing the painting is now. At the launch exhibit opening, she commented about the painting:

“It’s a documentation of the most barbaric and the most horrific genocide in our century.

When I painted this, it didn’t really start in 2023. It triggered so many memories of my life as a war survivor since the age of eight. So this painting really unfolds many of the memories I had as a child.

But let me say this painting is not a celebration. This exhibit is not a celebration. It’s a reminder that we have failed. We’re all a failure, humanity has failed.

This is not only my painting, it belongs to Gaza, to the people of Gaza. I hope it really disturbs you, I hope it haunts you forever… I hope you will never forget it. You’re all complicit, I’m sorry. The fact that you’re living a normal life, I’m so angry.”

Another notable (smaller-scale) piece Mattar made after the two-week IOF raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2023, completely destroying the biggest medical complex in Gaza and torturing people along the way.

Another artist living outside of the country, Samia Halaby, had grown up in Palestine but her family was forcibly expelled to Lebanon after the 1948 Nakba, which then led to them moving to the US in 1951. After going to school in the Midwest, she eventually landed in New York City, where she has been based for the past 50 years. Halaby is one of the great Palestinian painters, an undeniable figure in the world of abstract art.

While she hasn’t received enough recognition in the art world, February 2024 was meant to be her first Western retrospective exhibit. It was scheduled to open at her alma mater, Indiana University, but they canceled it a month before. The decision was made after three years of planning, making it even more insulting. It was a continuation of the anti-Palestinian censorship that Halaby has faced throughout her career.

Over 15,000 people signed a petition to get the exhibit re-instated, while IU students and faculty spoke out against the decision and put together community actions in support. In the end, it went to Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum a few months later, where Halaby had got her Masters degree. (Though MSU later censored a piece being shown at the same time by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid, Piquete en el capitolio, and they canceled the Fall opening party)

Additionally in the Spring of 2024, Halaby had been one of 26 Palestinian artists featured in an exhibit that Palestine Museum US submitted to the Venice Bienniale. It was called Foreigners in their Homeland: Occupation, Apartheid, Genocide – which was a response to the biennial's theme of “Foreigners Everywhere.” It was rejected for the official showcase, again demonstrating bias. But they were not deterred and the exhibit ran unofficially nearby in Venice anyway. Halaby contributed a new, 10-foot-wide abstract piece on Gaza.

Artistic Censorship
Samia Halaby’s IU exhibit or the Venice Bienialle rejection of Palestine Museum’s exhibit submission are far from the only uses of censorship in the field during the ongoing Gaza genocide. Artwork itself, or even artist statements, have been frequent targets. There are also cases of artists being censored simply for posting their support for Palestine on social media, or signing solidarity letters, among other instances.

In a November 2023 article from The Markaz Review about some of the initial acts of suppression, art historian and teacher-researcher Rose-Marie Ferré spoke about the need for artists to be welcomed. “Even if you don’t agree with them. They have the right to express themselves in a dialectical discourse. That’s how knowledge is built,” she said. Ferré also noted: “Curators and collectors construct art history. As they are committed, they will promote certain artists in line with political positions. Geopolitical unrest therefore has a direct impact on the orientations, discourses and images promoted at events.”

Art platform Hyperallergic has been covering many of the cases, and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) also created The Art Censorship Index: Post-October 7th that documents dozens of these instances.

Below are just some of the many examples (in no particular order of importance or timing):

• Keffiyeh usage - Native American artist Danielle SeeWalker had a summer 2024 artist residency canceled in Vail, Colorado, after locals complained about a painting she made of a Native woman wearing a keffiyeh. The work was titled “G for Genocide” and it was not even part of her work in the program, just a personal painting she had made on her own.

• On a similar note: Christie’s art auction house had agreed to sell paintings featuring a figure in a keffiyeh from Lebanese artist Ayman Baalbaki in its Middle Eastern Art sale prior to October 7, 2023, but then removed it due to the request of a very highly placed in the company. “I did not expect this decision from Christie’s, as they have previously sold similar works of mine,” Baalbaki said. “They also look for this specific theme in my artwork to include in their auctions.”

• Children’s exhibits - The United Nations had a public art exhibition in Fall 2024 The Global Peace Flag: Uniting the World in its General Assembly Lobby in New York City. The UN caved to Zionist complaints from Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, who said of Pro-Palestine art that “they promote hate in those drawings.” This included a map of the country as a watermelon. It was one of many cowardly acts by the UN, who accommodated this demand while the IOF has killed at least tens of thousands of children in Gaza in the year prior alone.

• From The River To The Sea - A 8-by-14-foot fiberglass installation in the design of a watermelon was forbidden from Burning Man for its title of From The River to the Sea. Using that same slogan – which is not anti-semitic, as its critics claim – also drew censorship in Miami, in Brooklyn, and beyond.

• Digital crackdown - Photographers and graphic designers have been censored on Meta’s platforms, especially Instagram, such as for certain images from protests or designs that feature resistance figures, for example. Platforms like Twitter have also censored voices like in Novemeber 2024 indefinitely suspending the account of Palestinian-American filmmaker Lexi Alexander.

There are too many examples to list them all, but these shed a light on a fraction of it.

Elsewhere in the art world, museums have been protested for their complicity – such as the Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and more. Overall, there have been many continuous actions against cultural institutions, demanding that they take a principled stand with Palestine.

Student Intifada
While many around the world stayed silent or inactive in response to the genocide, one group of people who decided to rise up was university students.

From the start, the smallest acts were faced with repression. At Detroit’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, for example, university administrators confiscated Palestinian flags from students’ studios and other campus spaces. At an open house after in November 2023, art students boycotted it and blocked the windows and entrances to their studios – “basically denying the school access to their experience as a way to sell the academy” according to one prospective student artist who went to tour the campus that day.

Repression continued across the world for students who wanted to showcase solidarity as Palestinians were being martyred en masse. At Columbia University, the Students for Justine in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace organizations were unjustly suspended that November. This also led to the previously-established Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition to be re-ignited afterwards.

Over the next few months there, Columbia students were doxxed and harassed. At a protest in January 2024, several students were even sprayed with a dangerous chemical substance by Columbia School of General Studies students who were former IOF soldiers. Yet the university neglected handling this appropriately, to put it mildly, and tensions continued to grow. Meanwhile, other students internationally continued to be punished, arrested, and targeted as well for any signs of solidarity with Palestine.

This set the stage to be ripe for CUAD students at Columbia to launch the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that began on April 17, setting up tents on a campus lawn at 4am, on the morning that university’s President Minouche Shafik was testifying before Congress. They called for disclosure and divestment from the university. However, instead of the administration engaging in good faith talks, they sent in the police for mass arrests.

That first action at Columbia University would go on to inspire over 170 other encampments across the world, primarily in the United States.

Art played a role in the encampments in different ways. For one, graphic design digital flyers, posted to social media (primarily Instagram), were a way for organizers to draw fellow students and community members to be aware and join in. Other times, multi-post image carousels were used to convey messaging around intentions, repression, or other topics.

There were also art builds as community-building activities, as well as dedicated areas to make signs, banners, and other mediums.

The Palestine Solidarity Committee at Indiana University named different areas after martyrs of Gaza, and for the art center/tent they dedicated it to the memory of Heba Zagout.

In April 2024, Hyperallergic published an article “Art Takes Center Stage at Growing Student Protests for Palestine” about the role of visual arts at the encampments. In the article, writer Mukta Joshi cites Ash Moniz, an artist and member of The New School community – a university who describes itself as a place where “your intellectual and creative journey moves seamlessly between the classroom and the city of New York.”

Yet as Moniz points out, he “observed a tension between universities’ push for socially engaged work and its actions toward students” when the enrolled students there launched one of the many encampments to demand divestment.

“Art is more valuable the more political it is. There is a historical relationship between art and social change, but the capitalist system has hijacked that historical moment. This capital shapes the market in a way that encourages students to embody a type of radicality that the market prefers, rather than the type of radicality that has influenced social change throughout history.”

Back at Columbia, the encampment stayed up after two weeks filled with arrests and more failed dialogue with the school. On April 29, there was a threat of the administration carrying out a police sweep. A smaller group of around 50 Columbia students from the much larger encampment had been feeling a need to escalate their protest further. With a sweep looming, that contingent decided the time had come for another planned step.

Just after midnight April 30, this group of Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building Columbia students in 1968 had occupied in protest against the Vietnam War.

Students re-named it Hind’s Hall in honor of the six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was martyred in January 2024 by the IOF in Gaza while alone in a car. Her phone call with emergency teams to try to save her was heard around the world, just before she was shot with 355 bullets.

As part of the building occupation, a banner was dropped that featured Handala – carrying on the legacy of Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali his and iconic symbol of the Palestinian people.

Unlike in 1968, when then Columbia President pushed for “maximum leniency” of the hundreds of students arrested in the building occupations, this time President Minouche Shafik and New York Police Department had other plans. The next day, a violent police raid on that night of April 30, happened first at Columbia University and then twenty blocks further uptown in Harlem at CUNY City College.

This was an extreme yet mostly emblematic representation of the brutality that protestors at encampments or otherwise faced across the country and world in Spring of 2024. In addition to police brutality, there has been violence from Zionist agitators against students – most notably at UCLA – as well as general harassment.

In another art-related example, a group of couple dozen students from the SJP chapter at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) also occupied an admin building on campus a week later in May 2024. They renamed it Fathi Ghaben Place after the artist who had recently passed in Gaza after not being able to evacuate for treatment.

Inside, the RISD student group also painted a mural of Ghaben. In their case, their four-day occupation eventually ended after the students were threatened with expulsion if they did not leave by a set deadline.

RISD administration, unlike other universities, said they did not want to bring in law enforcement to engage with students, perhaps not wanting a repeat of the bad PR that came with aggressive deployment or just wanting to avoid any potential litigation. Or, maybe as universities should, they didn’t want their students physically harmed if they could avoid it.

The spirit of the encampments also inspired creatives from around the world to make their own art in solidarity – with either specific schools or the student movement more broadly.

Just as the encampments were not limited to America, neither were the actions of art students. Dazed Magazine published a piece in July 2024 entitled How UK art students used their degree shows to protest for Palestine that covered actions from schools such as the University of Arts London and Goldsmiths' College. Students have been persistent in protests and using their own shows as spaces to exhibit art tied to Palestine and demand divestment, as well as putting on workshops and other educational efforts.

Goldsmiths for Palestine (GFP) students also occupied the Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Arts space and staged their own guerrilla exhibition, with specific attention given to the work of Palestinian artists, entitled And Still We Rise: A People’s Exhibition for Palestine.

“We chose to occupy the CCA due to the existence of the ‘Candida and Zac Gertler Gallery’, which we have since renamed the ‘Walid Daqqa Gallery’, in memory of the Palestinian political prisoner who was murdered by the Israeli state this April,” said one student. (For context: Daqqa was refused a release from prison after being held for 38 years, despite having cancer at the end of his life. To this day, Israeli courts have refused to even release Daqqa’s body to his family, saying it can be used as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations.)

Following Goldsmith’s students demands to remove Gertler’s name and ties to the gallery – due to the family’s ties to funding Israel – the university later agreed in October 2024 to take Gertler off the gallery, exhibition notes, and donor board.

In November 2024, a Columbia students also launched an art exhibition to look back on the encampment under the name of “Hinds House” – a nod back to Hind Rajab and the Hind’s Hall name – by a group also named the Hinds House Collective (HHC). In their statement, they said art building during the encampments served as a vital outlet for community, a means to come together and stand against genocide. The installation also happened again in December 2024 at another location and appears to be the start of a recurring event.

Overall in the Fall 2024 semester, encampments specifically may have been less frequent (though still going, like at Sarah Lawrence College) but students have continued to disrupt in many ways. They have to navigate a level of crackdown and repression that is even higher than the Spring, with university administrations continuing to be beholden to donors and their investments. Even activities as simple as students doing a study-in at their library with keffiyehs or solidarity signs on their computers have proven “the Palestine exception” of free speech at universities is arguably more enforced than ever.

Design & Photos for Protests
One aspect to the student encampments in Spring 2024 was that they often called on community members to come and support, especially when they were being targeted by the school’s administration and/or police. To answer calls from the students, there were local protests in solidarity.

Sometimes it was just assorted residents who showed up. Other times, local Pro-Palestinian groups helped to organize people to help support the universities.

One example of this was from Within Our Lifetime (WOL) in New York City, who organized frequently outside encampments at different NYC schools like Columbia, CUNY City College, and more.

WOL is an organization that actually grew out of starting as a New York City chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine around a decade ago. It then grew into its own community-based organization, in particular for Muslims and Arabs in New York City. It was renamed in 2019 with its own points of unity as a way to continue organizing after and outside of the school system.

They are one of the groups around the world who had been organizing protests for years, but received heightened participation from more people joining the cause in the streets after October 2023, due to the ongoing genocide and further exposure of the long history of Zionist violence against Palestinians.

The international protests have been persistent during the year and counting, often met with police repression as well.

Throughout protests in several areas like New York City and Berlin, photography has been a medium used to capture the actions through different lenses and perspectives. Captured in them are also visual staples of said actions – such as keffiyehs, the Palestinian flag or related flags, sign art, banners, and other forms of representation.

Poster Resurgence
The art of posters had never officially died out, but there was certainly a decline in their means of getting messages out between the signing of Oslo and the start of the genocide. While the Palestine Poster Project is not a fully comprehensive archive that covers anything, it does give a general sense of trends in production.

At a time when social media allows everyone to share their work, it is an unprecedented time when considering both the amount of visual art made in support of Palestine internationally and how easy it is to share it digitally.

One can look to Flyers for Falastin as just one example of all of the artwork that people around the world have been making and sharing daily in this period. They also work with artists to make designs available online to print out physically and distribute widely.

There are also plenty of great individuals and teams doing great work as well. One independent example is Studio Salud, who has crafted their own style of mostly black-and-white posters that have a carefully crafted style. The person behind the studio, Monica, is a Jewish-American artist and Creative Director who has for years rejected the occupation.

Local resistance groups in Gaza and the West Bank have continued the historic tradition and used posters as well. And since they’re deemed by Western countries as “terrorist” groups, those factions are banned from having direct accounts on major social media platforms.

However, through other methods online, the digital poster designs are able to be distributed – along with other materials, including videos that document their own operations against the IOF through GoPro and SLR digital cameras. They have shown throughout the genocide that they continue to carry out successful missions against the IOF, inflicting more casualties than are reported in Israeli official numbers, and showing that the resistance has remained steadfast throughout the genocide.

It’s especially worth noting the poster side of this because of the tradition displayed across this page of Art History, of which resistance art is an undeniable part of. Even publishing the work on this page presents a risk, but it would not be sufficient to speak to the visual art of this moment without speaking on it for educational purposes.

Since the 1960s there has been a significant use of the poster as a propaganda tool. The significance and distribution today is different, of course, but clearly they are still part of a messaging strategy – one that shouldn’t be ignored. And some day these posters may belong in a museum, along with others from the Palestine Poster Project archive.

From a design perspective, most of their posters follow a more digitally-heavy look, but occasionally there are other types of approaches.

As a side note, resistance fighters have also referenced Handala, Naji Al-Ali’s character, in at least once instance – part of a broader approach in communicating Palestinian history, people, culture, locations, fellow or past fighters, and anything representing the reason why they’re dedicated to the liberation of the country.

Impact in the West Bank
For artists in the West Bank who are not going through this genocide, they still have their own system of apartheid filled with repression. Yet the pain they feel for their fellow Palestinians have placed a heavy weight on their hearts. Sliman Mansour – who remains in the West Bank – has said his work has taken a hit in the past year.

“Many artists, myself included, are unsure of what to do at this moment. I can say this is the most challenging period I’ve ever experienced. As an artist living under occupation, not knowing what to do is incredibly difficult. Our work and production have significantly decreased, but for now, we continue to try, hoping that change will come through persistence.”

Within the first year after the genocide began, there were over 11,000 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank. Another 4,500 have been displaced. The conditions have continued to worsen for everyday life, even more dramatically than before, for people of all ages.

Most notably, at the end of August 2024, Israeli Occupation Forces launched “Operation Summer Camps” – their largest military operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, more than 20 years earlier. Jenin was under siege for 10 days, including massive destruction of infrastructure and dozens martyred, as well as in other areas nearby like Tulkarem and Tubas. Since then the aggression has continued from both settlers and enlisted IOF soldiers.

Local journalist Mariam Barghouti said in November 2024: “We are so heavily surveilled in the West Bank. From drones to at least five cameras at every junction, infiltration to our phones, to settlers controlling Palestinian movement. Israeli soldiers are always stationed at the edges of every single village or town in the West Bank with guns and watchtowers. Every move is watched… It’s truly like a big torture camp, and the prisons are our own homes.”

Dazed Magazine also published an article in October 2024 entitled Israel’s relentless war on culture in the West Bank, highlighting how the repression in the West Bank has also targeted arts organizations and individuals. This includes Dar Jacir, as well as its nearby Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, which has been forced to shift its heavy efforts on creative projects to those of medical and food programs, with little time left for art.

The article talks about how some people feel so distraught over the luck they have to be in the West Bank, despite their own conditions, because they look to the people of Gaza and can’t bear what they’re forced to go through at the same time. Around this point, the article also notes:

“For people in the West, it might be comforting to think of art and culture as something which endures even in the bleakest circumstances: maybe it makes us feel less guilty about the crimes being committed with the support of our governments; maybe it appeals to some sentimental ideas about the indomitability of the human spirit.

In the case of Palestine, this idea is to some extent true: people are still making art, still preserving their culture, and still fighting for liberation. Palestinians are not passive victims. You don’t have to look hard to find humbling acts of courage or collective care. But the reality is more complicated.

As Emily (Jacir) says, some people are so distressed that they cannot continue to function as normal, and this is not a mark of weakness or a failure on their part, but a profoundly human reaction to slaughter on a mass scale.”

While this page primarily focuses on Palestine, it’s worth noting the heightened Israeli aggression on Lebanon that ramped up at the end of September 2024, which is still ongoing. This included the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an attack on Beirut in an attack that killed many Lebanese civilians.

As Israel claims to be targeting Hezbollah everywhere, just like they do with Hamas, there have been endless airstrikes on civilians and mass displacement of millions of Lebanese. Around 37 villages in southern Lebanon were demolished as of early November 2024.

There have also been Israeli airstrike attacks elsewhere in the Middle East – such as in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran – that are not as extensive yet, but still harmful.

The people in Gaza have expressed their appreciation for their allies, like with a mural that went viral by 22-year-old Palestinian artist Jameel Al-Baz.

One Year & Counting
Around the year mark of the ongoing genocide, at the start of October 2024, the IOF enacted a so-called “General’s Plan” of heightened ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, intended to pave the way for future settlements and continue the displacement of the Nakba.

The IOF imposed a complete siege of Jabalia – as well as Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun – described as a “genocide within a genocide.”

As they committed war crimes in the North during this time, there was also a notable moment down South in Rafah on October 16, 2024, an area that has been destroyed beyond measure. After seeing some movement in a location, Israeli Occupation Forces targeted a building with a drone strike. The people in there, who were resistance fighters, survived as more fighting ensued.

Eventually, an Israeli drone entered the building and found a fighter sitting on a chair, down to one arm, with a keffiyeh wrapped around his head. The fighter threw a wooden stick at it as a last sign of struggle. Right after, the building was bombed.

The next morning, IOF soldiers came back to check on the body and realized it had been Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, who fought until his very last breath. They had martyred him by accident, not even knowing who it had been in the moment.

Sinwar’s final moments, documented in footage released by Israeli Occupation Forces for their own PR purposes, led to many emphasizing this in fact gave him an even greater legacy as a result – including by artists who paid tribute to him in the immediate days that followed.

Despite Israel’s publicly-claimed goals of “eliminating Hamas” or “bringing home the hostages” – which they claim Sinwar’s death is a vital blow for – nothing changed about their approach after. Their aggression only further increased.

After a month of an escalated and ongoing siege on northern Gaza, including against hospital and civil defense infrastructure, an IOF General said on US Election night that “Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza.”

This has been a common tactic, of carrying out attacks – or in this case announcing strategy – while there is a big distraction like American holidays and major cultural events.

Later in the week, the IOF put out a statement to back pedal, but it seems clear that their intention is to take over the North, potentially to try to build settlements there (which haven’t existed in Gaza since 2005) for Israeli settlers to live.

No matter what their next plans truly are, there needs to be an arms embargo by the US and other Western countries to end the genocide. Even the International Criminal Court has finally ordered arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant as of November 2024.

It’s been over 425 days and Israeli forces continue to act with impunity. When will the modern-day holocaust end?

Last updated: December 2024