Gaza artist turns war rubble into fragile sculptures of pain and resilience
Gaza City / PNN /
In Gaza, displacement and bombardment have become a way of life — a relentless cycle imposed by Israel’s war machine. Towers, homes, art, and history are reduced to dust in seconds, erasing not just buildings but entire lifetimes. Among the many stories of loss stands that of Khaled Hussein, a sculptor from Rafah whose years of artistic work have been wiped out by airstrikes and forced displacement — a testament to what he calls “the systematic execution of Palestinian culture.”
When the war began, Hussein fled his home in Rafah, leaving behind his clay sculptures and paintings, hoping to return and find them intact. But Israeli bombardment destroyed his house, burying his art beneath the rubble. During a brief ceasefire, he managed — with help from neighbours — to retrieve a few surviving pieces and move them to a relative’s home. Days later, renewed airstrikes levelled that house too, erasing everything he had created since he began sculpting in 2015.
Hussein’s art reflects Gaza’s daily displacement and the deep exhaustion of its people after more than two years of war. Using clay extracted from the ruins of bombed homes, he shapes faces of men, women, and children marked by fear, anger, and fatigue — emotions that have become the defining features of Gaza’s population.
“Clay is fragile, just like us under bombardment,” he said. “It mirrors the psychological state of people living under constant fear and loss. It’s everywhere — beneath the rubble — and it breaks easily, like our lives here.”
After finishing a sculpture, Hussein photographs it as proof of existence before destroying it himself. He says it’s impossible to move the fragile works from place to place while constantly displaced. “Like the displaced person who can only carry his children and papers, I can’t carry my art. It’s part of the same journey of loss,” he said.
In other moments of reflection, Hussein sculpts on Gaza’s beaches — shaping clay figures in the sand, only for the waves to gradually wash them away. “I let the sea take them,” he said. “It’s how life feels in Gaza — here one moment, gone the next.”
Hussein began his artistic career in 2015, co-founding the Kayan Gallery with fellow artists to showcase clay and cement sculptures reflecting the hardship of life under blockade. In 2021, he opened an exhibition titled “I Miss You Deeply,” featuring seven pieces depicting young Palestinians who lost their limbs during Israel’s suppression of the “Great March of Return” protests. Through his art, he sought to explore what gives these young men pride and hope despite their suffering.
He believes artists in Gaza carry a social and national responsibility to document their people’s pain and perseverance. “Art tells what cameras cannot,” Hussein said. “It conveys the human details — the emptiness, the loss, the resilience — in ways news reports never could.”
As Gaza endures one of the most destructive wars in modern history, Khaled Hussein’s fragile sculptures stand as silent witnesses — shaped from the dust of demolished homes and destined to crumble — yet telling the story of a people who refuse to disappear.
This story was produced as part of the “Qarib” programme, implemented by the French media development agency CFI and funded by the French Development Agency (AFD).
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