An enormous banner by the US street artist Shepard Fairey, based on a photograph of an injured Palestinian child crying by the Gazan photojournalist Belal Khaled, was unfurled by Greenpeace activists on the façade of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid Wednesday morning (24 January). The work was accompanied by another banner urging “ceasefire now” in the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023.
Posting on Instagram, the environmental non-profit Greenpeace and UnMute Gaza, an organisation that supports photojournalists in Gaza, wrote: “Our two organisations denounce the situation in Gaza, like the vast majority of civil society, and call for an immediate ceasefire.”
The intervention appears to have taken place without the consent of the museum, which “is internationally known for housing Picasso’s Guernica, a symbol of the suffering of civilians in wars”, the UnMute Gaza post continues. The Reina Sofia could not be immediately reached for comment. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 as an anti-war work in response to the aerial bombing of the titular Basque town by Nazi German and Italian fascist forces, in league with Francisco Franco’s Spanish nationalists.
In a post from 18 December, in which he condemned both the attacks by Hamas in Israel on 7 October and the enormous loss of civilian life in Gaza in the months since, Fairey wrote that he supports UnMute Gaza because he is a pacifist. “I believe in solutions to disagreements that avoid violence,” he added. His post goes on to address the coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
“One thing that has emerged very quickly to me is that the Western media is largely uninterested in giving equal coverage to the suffering in Gaza that has taken the lives of an estimated 18,000 Palestinian civilians, many who are women and children,” he wrote; since then the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 25,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. “There are many photojournalists working courageously in Gaza to shed light on the real human consequences of Israel’s offensive.”
At least 83 journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war (76 Palestinian, four Israeli and three Lebanese), according to the most recent figures from the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists. The number of journalists killed in the past three months has surpassed those killed during the entire Second World War, according to the non-profit Freedom Forum, and is already around half the number of those killed in the Iraq war over nine years.
