Palestinian Artists Who Refuse to Be Silenced
Every morning on Gaza's beach, Yazid Abu Jarad and his team carve intricate sculptures into the sand. They know the tide will wash everything away by evening. That's the point. The art isn't meant to last, it's meant to happen, to bring joy for a few hours, to remind people that beauty still exists.
"When we create art on Gaza's beach, you can see it on the faces of children and even the elderly," says team member Majd Jarad. "People drift into a different world for a moment." Then the waves come, and tomorrow they start again.
This kind of stubborn creativity is everywhere in Gaza right now. In displacement camps and damaged buildings, on flour sacks and tent walls, artists keep working. According to PEN America's September 2025 report, at least 151 cultural figures have been killed since October 2023. Twelve museums destroyed. Every university damaged. Thirty-two cultural centers gone. But somehow, 2025 became one of the most productive years many of these artists have ever had.
When Loss Becomes Fuel
Poet Alaa al-Qatrawi lost all four of her children in December 2023 when Israeli airstrikes hit their home in Khan Younis. Yamen was 8. The twins Kinan and Orkida were 6. Karmel was 2½. In 2025, al-Qatrawi wrote more than she ever had before. Her collection "A Tent in the Sky" won the Suad Al-Sabah Award for Palestinian Creativity.
"My painful story became fuel burning within me," she said, "transforming into texts filled with sorrows and pains on one hand, and hopes and imaginings of what they could have been on the other."
Writer Mahmoud Jouda's house was completely destroyed, taking his personal library and the nearly finished draft of his novel with it. He keeps writing anyway. Filmmaker Mustafa al-Nabih has been displaced eight times. He made four films in 2025.
Eighteen-year-old Hussein al-Jerjawi paints on empty UNRWA flour bags because there's no canvas. The humanitarian aid materials become his medium. Twenty-two filmmakers collaborated on "From Ground Zero," an anthology that was shortlisted for the 2025 Academy Awards. Director Ahmed Hassouna initially said no, he was too busy trying to save his family, searching for firewood. His segment ends with him burning his clapperboard to stay warm.
Why Keep Creating?
Visual artist Lamees Al-Sharif watched people tear apart her paintings to use the wood for cooking fires. "It wasn't an attack on art," she said. "It was a way to survive." Still, she insists cultural work matters. "What I created during the war was deeply personal, not beautiful, not communal. I needed to feel that I still existed."
In July 2025, twenty-five artists held an exhibition at a Gaza City coffee shop. They called it Aphenix and produced fifty-five works despite hunger, limited supplies, transportation nightmares, and constant bombardment. Artist Mohaned Asayas explained the message: "We are here, and Gaza is still home to brilliant young talents with bold ideas and unyielding will."
The 2025 Gaza Biennale managed to get work from fifty-three artists to Brooklyn, though many pieces are reproductions, the originals couldn't leave. The exhibition materials reflect the reality: images wheatpasted onto poster squares, visible eye hooks, everything temporary. Artist Fatima Ali Abu Owdah called it "a final call before the coffins close on all that remains."
Some artists didn't survive to see their work exhibited. Painter Frans Al-Salmi was killed by Israeli military on June 30, 2025, while working on a canvas at a seaside café. Her painting ended up stained with her own blood. Heba Zagout died with her two children in October 2023. Filmmaker Roshdi Sarraj, who founded the Ain Media collective with his wife, was killed that same month. He was 31.
Art as Witness
Theater director Hossam Madhoun points out that even before this war, Gaza's artists had to navigate Israeli occupation, blockades, poverty, and local restrictions. They kept creating anyway. Summer Lopez of PEN America puts it simply: "Cultural heritage is not just about buildings or artifacts; it is the embodiment of a people's identity, history, and future."
Artist Mahmoud Al-Sha'er watched his institution, Gallery and Magazine 28, get reduced to rubble. His response: "Art is stronger than war. It does not break; it does not die. It is what allows us to believe that life still exists amid the ruins."
Al-Qatrawi, the poet who lost her children, sees a strange truth in all this suffering. "The genocide has proven, paradoxically, to be fertile ground for endless creativity because reality exceeded description in every detail of daily life." These artists don't create despite the war, they create because of it. Bearing witness is resistance. Documenting their reality preserves their humanity. In the face of destruction, the act of creation itself becomes revolutionary.