The Route Back Home: How Gaza's children use art to express the nightmares of genocide
Amid the remarkable, moving artwork and written testimonies of children from Gaza on display at the Old Palesteine House in Brighton, there is one blank canvas suspended among the others.
It belongs to Ghazi Ramadan. The eight-year-old Palestinian boy wanted to draw a shopping mall where he could go and buy things.
Just the ordinary pleasures of life that existed in Gaza, as in other parts of the world, before October 2023. But he never got to draw his mall. He was killed by Israel in April 2024 during the genocide.
His art teacher Cleopatra Naeem collected all the things that Ghazi said he wanted to paint, and she gave them to his mother to help her process her grief for her son.
Naeem was speaking during a live roundtable with members of the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Gaza. She spoke about the conditions in which this project - Masar al Awda ilal Bayt (the route back home) - working with Palestinian children had been developed during the genocide.
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