The artist Maisara Baroud and his family have been displaced 12 times since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. In pictures and words, he describes their journey and the impact of the fighting
The artist Maisara Baroud never found living in Gaza easy. The Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed in 2007 after Hamas’s violent takeover of the territory, was suffocating, and Rimal, his middle-class neighbourhood in
Baroud’s work has always drawn on the hardships of life in Gaza, a black and white palette reflecting a grey city, where characters weave in and out of claustrophobic spaces. Now it is a record of a year of displacement, chaos and pain: aid packages that fall into the sea, tents that fail to protect from either cold or heat, hospitals that become killing zones.
“They said the south was safe … but the tanks and planes have destroyed everything. My dreams, my wife’s dreams, my children’s dreams, and my small world … Everything has ended. There is no future here. There is only death,” he said. Hamas broke out of Gaza at dawn on 7 October, massacring 1,200 people, the majority of whom were civilians, and seizing another 250 as bargaining chips, according to Israeli tallies.
It is unclear how many more bodies lie under the rubble of collapsed buildings or have died from disease or illness since. The war has also created a generation of orphans. The UN put the number of children without mothers at 19,000 in April, and other estimates run as high as 25,000. “As a family, we managed to stay together. In some places, the situation on the ground allowed us only hours to stay, while others were relatively safe, far from tank shells but never far from airstrikes and drones,” he said.
Rafah, the southernmost point of the strip, would be safest, the family reasoned: the Israelis could not attack an area where more than a million civilians had fled. They were wrong.
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