Palestinian artist destroys own paintings to help feed his family in Gaza

More than 100 aid organisations and human rights groups have warned about Israel's 'mass starvation' campaign

A Palestinian artist has shared a heartbreaking video capturing the harsh reality that families in Gaza are currently enduring.

In the clip, Taha Abu Ghali is seen destroying his own paintings – figurative surrealist works with abstract and cubist influences – to use their frames as firewood to cook for his children.

“In this harsh crisis, we feel like we have no choice but to destroy the wooden boards stored in drawers, because there’s no fuel, no electricity, no gas, no kerosene,” he says in the video.

“We can’t find flour or anything to cook with. As you can see, these are some of my most beautiful paintings – drawings, portraits of children, colours, stories. Art that once carried meaning. All gone. Burnt to survive. In a crisis, even beauty becomes firewood.”

Abu Ghali, who graduated from Al Aqsa University and is an experienced art teacher, adds that these works took years to complete. Now they have become the only refuge for cooking, as Gaza continues suffering under an Israeli blockade, the trauma of which “will last for generations”, a UN expert on famine told The National.

Earlier this week, more than 100 aid organisations and human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that “mass starvation” was spreading in the Palestinian enclave.

World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added that a “large proportion” of the population of Gaza was starving. “I don't know what you would call it other than mass starvation – and it's man-made,” he said.

Israel denied it was starving Palestinians and disputed the number of the dead. “In Gaza today, there is no famine caused by Israel,” government spokesman David Mencer told reporters. “There is a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas.”

Officials in Gaza say at least 113 people, many of them children, have died of starvation during Israel's blockade on life-sustaining aid, which includes baby food.

Additionally, almost all of Gaza's population of 2.2 million people is displaced, the death toll from direct bombardment is inching towards 60,000 people with more than 143,000 injured, and living conditions are squalid, unsafe and rife with disease.