Ghoulish blue figures reach skyward towards an elusive red spiral in an abstract rendering of Gaza life hung in the ruins of a cultural center bombed and torched during the Israeli offensive. The paintings hang in the scorched depths of the Red Crescent cultural center in Gaza City, which was destroyed at the height of the 22-day war. They are the work of Nida Badwan, an arts student who used to volunteer there. I wanted to exhibit them here because the building itself speaks, Badwan says. It tells the story of the paintings, and it speaks louder than they do. Israel s onslaught - aimed at halting rocket fire from the Hamas-run enclave - killed an estimated 1,330 Palestinians and left behind vast fields of rubble, shattered homes and burned-out buildings. The red and blue paintings hang on a charred black wall, and the handful of visitors follows a trail shoveled through a drift of broken glass and concrete. For Badwan, the exhibition is a quiet act of defiance. This was a cultural center. It had nothing to do with politics or fighting, she says, gesturing towards a collapsed and blackened auditorium. It was a place for music, for poetry, for theater. It should have been sacred. And it will come back. Even if they destroy it four or five more times, we will bring it back. Badwan spent the war in the relative safety of central Gaza, but she could hear the shelling and the Israeli jets flying low overhead by day and night. Her paintings created both before and during the fighting, reflect not only the Gaza war, but also the 60-year-old Palestinian struggle against Israel. The color blue reminds me of UNRWA, she says, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. It s the color of the refugees. My family and I are refugees, so I am always conscious of that. Like most of Gaza s 1.5 million residents, Badwan is descended from Palestinians who fled there from what is now southern Israel during the 1948 war that followed the creation of the Jewish state. The blockade is a slow death Most of the more than one million registered refugees in Gaza rely on the food aid and basic services provided by UNRWA - which often paints its compounds, schools and distribution centers the blue and white of its logo. In one painting, pages from UN brochures with pictures of smiling Gaza children float on red paint splashed across the canvas. Another has a swirl of vaguely human forms overlaid with crude suture-like cross-strokes. The shadowy figures evoke the refugees from 1948, but also the people who took shelter in Al-Quds hospital next door to the center when they fled the surrounding Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood ahead of advancing Israeli forces. On January 15 Israeli tanks roared into the streets as snipers took up positions on the many tall residential buildings surrounding the city center. The neighborhood erupted with a deafening hail of gunfire and explosions as hospital workers and foreign doctors huddled with the displaced inside the hospital complex. Hospital officials and other witnesses said Israeli forces bombarded the district with white phosphorus, setting several buildings on fire - including the hospital - and forcing everyone inside to flee into the night. In a scene of panic medics and hospital workers wheeled patients on stretchers and babies in incubators out into the flame-lit streets as gunfire echoed off the walls. Saib Kullap, a 24-year-old hospital worker who helped people escape, said the scene reminded him of the movie Titanic. It was like the entire neighborhood was about to sink beneath the flames. Rights groups have accused Israel of illegally using white phosphorus in heavily populated civilian areas. Israel has said all the munitions it used during the Gaza war are permitted under international law. The fighting in the enclave came to an end when Israel and Hamas declared unilateral ceasefires last month, but Gaza remains under an Israeli blockade that seals it off from all but basic humanitarian aid. Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets and Israel has retaliated with air strikes after threatening a disproportionate response. Standing in the now-quiet ruins of the Red Crescent, Badwan feels her work spans the period before the war and the uneasy calm that has followed it. There is no difference between the blockade and war, she says. The blockade is a slow death and war is a fast one.
