Simple drawings bear messages of suffering from Gaza’s children

posted on: Aug 13, 2015

In her small atelier surrounded by hundreds of small, medium and large portraits, Palestinian painter Majdal Nateel from the besieged Gaza Strip uses her skills to express her hopes for the future through her very simple, yet beautiful and expressive, drawings and paintings.

Young mother Nateel looks after her family and home, but this has never been an obstacle on her way to see the world in the way she imagines it to be. “I am ambitious,” she said. “I had the ambition to serve the people of Palestine, as well as the Palestinian cause and, ever since I was a little girl, I thought to spread the word about Palestinian suffering.”

However, like other Palestinians, she has no well-known platform from which to address people. “So I created my own platform. With primary gifted talent, I started to express my messages through my simple paintings while still at preparatory school.”

Her first drawings attracted the attention of her art teacher, who began to pay more attention until she became more skilful. “This led me to win many drawing competitions held for Gaza’s young artists, which paved the way for me to become a bit famous.”

Bitter experience
Despite her desire to stay at home to develop her skills and help her two little daughters and husband, who leaves for work at 8am every day and returns at 5pm, she felt that she was needed to help bereaved women and children in the many shelters around the Gaza Strip. They are among the half-a-million people who were displaced when their houses were destroyed during last year’s 51-day Israeli offensive on the territory, which also killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

Gaza Incidents
View details of all major incidents of Israeli aggression against Gaza this year

The UN estimates that nearly 400,000 children in Gaza require some form of counselling and trauma therapy to cope with the events they witnessed or experienced during the 2014 offensive, when the Israeli military rained down death and destruction on the densely populated coastal strip.

“I could not stay at home then,” explained Nateel. “I went out to Al-Karmel Secondary School, which was hosting more than 800 women and children. I started helping the displaced, and their stories fascinated me. I listened to children narrating tales of horrible escapes under heavy Israeli bombardment at their houses in Al-Shejaia neighbourhood.”

She listened to women who had left dead family members behind. “One woman who gave birth to a baby boy just two weeks before the war left three dead family members behind, including her husband. She suffered too much to make her baby sleep where there was no cradle. She used a school chair and placed it upside down like a cot and kept moving it until her baby fell asleep.”

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com