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'
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
