Gaza Artists Reimagine Israeli Air Strike Smokes As Symbolic Art

“War does not determine who is right - only who is left.” - Bertrand Russell.27-year-old Gaza-Native & artist, Tawfiq Gebreel, is responding to the ongoing Gaza crisis through art. As the world looks on with horror at the growing civilian toll in Gaza, he felt a need to send a message in the ‘“universal humanitarian language understood by all peoples of the world.” Using photos of smoke thrown up by rocket artists, he has reworked the images to portray symbols of hope & unity instead.

Though the project was of a personal nature, inspired by a need to reconcile his drawings with the reality he was seeing and a need for catharsis, his larger aim was to raise awareness about the situation onground. Despite the chaos that surrounds him, Gebreel says, “I have the ambition that I do several exhibitions in several countries and publish my depictions of the suffering of the Palestinian people through graphic art and so the world knows the Strip.” Ultimately, this is his peaceful way of showing his own resistance to the situation.
And Tawfiq isn’t the only one either. While his paintings may be more focussed on the symbolism of hope and peace, others like Belal Khaled and Bushra Shanan have also joined in the movement, sketching similar symbols as well as sketched faces, reminding us that below the billows of smoke, civilian lives are being lost.
In the current scenario, the visual saturation of the world ensures that very few images move us. We hope that you find that these ones filter through the rest, just as we did. Scroll on to view them all:

Tawfiq Gebreel