The Route Back Home: How Gaza's children use art to express the nightmares of genocide
Submitted by
Joe Gill
on
Thu, 04/30/2026 - 08:48
The project at Old Palesteine House in Brighton features paintings by children who have lived through Israel's atrocities in the besieged territory
A painting by one of the children that features in the project shows a girl walking amid the shrouds of the dead in Gaza (Joe Gill/MEE)
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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.
“I have worked with young people for 15 years,” she explains during the Zoom meeting attended by Middle East Eye.
“We have been through ups and downs...but nothing like this genocide.”
'We have been through ups and downs...but nothing like this genocide'
- Cleopatra Naeem, Palestinian art teacher
Naeem is one of a group of art teachers from Gaza who have worked with young children since the early weeks of the war in 2023 to offer them a way of processing the shock and trauma of displacement and violence.
“Children at the beginning did not want to speak, they were mute,” she says. “They felt that to talk about it [the genocide] was like a crime.”
So Naeem created a safe space - she called it a “black box”, like a children’s den, where the children could go and feel safe.
“Children were coming from all over the place, they didn’t know each other. They built their own houses… Slowly they began to open up and tell their stories.”
'Atmosphere of care and love'
She recounts a boy telling how he was with his father at home when they came under bombardment from an Israeli tank.
The boy saw another child across the street and called on him to “come over here”. The other child joined him, but later they became separated.
Then, during one of the sessions organised by the Tamer Institute, the boy and the other child recognised each other. They cried and hugged each other upon their reunion.
The Tamer Institute facilitators in Gaza created a space where children could go to feel safe. Paintings by children on display at Old Palesteine House in Brighton (Joe Gill/MEE)
Naeem says: “Those workshops created an atmosphere of care and love, and the children started to dream of going home, and to dream of what they would do when they got home.”
Lamees Alsharif, another of the Tamer Institute facilitors on the call, explained: “We really had to give the children a feeling of being safe, and when they started laughing I felt that I had really got somewhere with them.”
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None of this was easy for the teachers who were themselves displaced and had their homes destroyed and families scattered.
“There was a point in the genocide when we realised that we were never going home, that we were repeating the Nakba of 1948,” she says.
Among the experiences that the children would describe was going through the so-called “safe passage” created by Israeli forces between north and south Gaza. For them to open up about this nightmarish experience took time and care.
“You need to walk in a straight line,” Alsharif says of the safe passage. “A young girl had her sister with her, aged five. Her mother was at the front, the young sister in the middle and she was at the back. Then the five-year-old tripped over a corpse.” They helped her up and carried on.
Another young girl saw something no one - particularly not a child - should ever see: a dog eating a baby’s body. She told Alsharif her story, and others did the same.
'The girl saw a lot of skulls'
The delicate process of enabling the children to share their experiences of genocidal violence in a way that helped them rebuild psychologically was, unsurprisingly, challenging for the adult facilitators.
At times it was the children who kept the adults going through the mutual care and love they shared in the project.
Another child was trapped at Al-Shifa Hospital during an Israeli siege, and saw the skulls of Palestinians who had been killed and buried around the hospital by Israeli forces.
“The girl saw lots of skulls,” says Alsharif. “At the beginning of the workshop, she was really struggling. She tried to draw but her hand would shake so hard, so I said, ‘no let’s play instead’.
“On the third session she was able draw it - in fact, she insisted she would do it.”
A selection of paintings that appear as part of The Route Back Home project (Joe Gill/MEE)
The atmosphere of nurture and the space to create art gave a voice to children who had lost their ability to speak, says Alsharif.
“A girl was mute, and she keeps drawing a specific room where everything is turned upside down” during an Israeli attack. Her brother had died underneath her.
Alsharif says she had a nervous breakdown after these workshops, as the children were describing “massive war crimes”.
Then she realised that all the children were waiting for her, that they kept turning up for the art and writing sessions, so that she had to keep going.
'Unchilding'
The exhibition in Brighton, titled “I’m like a fish, and fierce like a lion, when I enter the ring of fire” (a line from one of the children) was curated by Syrian-British writer Nadia Quadmani and Palestinian researcher Ala’ Najmah.
The curators are consciously seeking to break the cycle of western consumption of Palestinian suffering, as mediated through social media and news; a process in which the agency of the children and their voices is eclipsed and erased.
'It is the ‘unchilding’ of the Palestinian children which justifies their killing, it is the unchilding which justifies the whole dehumanising of these children'
- Ala’ Najmah, Palestinian curator and researcher
In order to survive in this “economy of testimony”, Gaza’s children perform their innocence to western audiences online, the curators explain; for a world that has denied them their childhood.
Najmah refers to the concept of “unchilding”, as coined by Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, which refers to the authorised expulsion of children from childhood to achieve political goals.
She says: “It is the ‘unchilding’ of the Palestinian children which justifies their killing, it is the unchilding which justifies the whole dehumanising of these children, stating things like 'these are human animals, they are going to grow up to be terrorists, let's kill them'.
“On the other side we have the consumption of content produced by Palestinian children, who are framed as innocent and almost oblivious.
“The viewer consumes their innocence almost with a 19th-century framework, in which the innocent child liberates the western adult of all their guilt.”
The works of art by the children are accompanied by testimonies of their life amid war, siege and genocide, ensuring that their voices are clear and unmediated. Themes include shortages of food, lack of access to essentials such as soap, and thoughts of death.
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Raggad Shallah, aged 10, says: “Mama is a liar. When I ask her what she’s cooking today, she says ‘maqlooba’. So I start eating and ask her, ‘Where’s the chicken?’. She laughs and says: ‘This is a fake maqlooba.’ She gives me a piece of eggplant and says: ‘This is the chicken breast you love,’ and she keeps laughing.”
Farah Fathi Abu Suweilim, aged 17, recalls the arrival of hygiene products after their long absence from Gaza: “After shampoo and soap finally entered the area, my cousin told me: If you only knew what happened when I first put soap on my hair, suddenly my hair started going ‘hee, see, hee!'”
One girl, Minna, painted a picture she called The Whirlpool to represent her feelings of fear and "heavy thoughts" about the war.
She wrote: “I do not want to be a bird, not a fish, nor a home, nor a family, nor a warm embrace, nor do I want to be the steps I hid, the laughter I did not laugh, or the holiday that came and went. I want to be the road that takes me home." Minna was later killed by a bullet that pierced her as she slept in her tent.
Mohammed al-Zaqzouq, a Tamer Institute facilitator, says: “Nothing remains but the painting of the whirlpool and Minna’s call that we carry with us, a call that we want to keep alive forever.”
The exhibition is planning to go to the University of Glasgow in July, with a wider library-based tour beginning to take shape, including possible future presentations in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Iceland, Eindhoven and Lisbon.
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