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The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has flooded the internet with often disturbing images of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks. Although such pictures succeed in shocking you, they fundamentally can’t evoke empathy.
Humanize Palestine “attempts to restore the humanity that is often stripped away when Palestinians are reduced to calculative deaths, forgettable names, and burned and mutilated bodies, rather than people who shared loved ones, stories, dreams and aspirations” by honoring the memories of the departed with pictures of them in their everyday lives and at peace with the world.
The blog was started after the killing of Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir on July 2, 2014 in the Beit Hanina/Shuafat neighborhood of Al-Quds in Jerusalem, when pictures of Khdeir’s body circulated on the internet. The blog wants “honor the deceased as martyrs by bringing them back to life through their pictures, stories, art, and poetry” and encourages submissions ofimages, videos and/or artwork of the Palestinian deceased.
In its latest entry, the blog humanizes 2-year-old Angam Elzowidi, 6-year-old Roaya Elzowidi, 37-year-old Dalia Abdel Hamid Elzowidi, 23-year-old Mahmoud Abdel Hamid Elzowidi and 20-year-old Mohammad Khalid Jamil Elzowidi, all victims of airstrikes and bombings in the city of Beit Hanoun on July 19th.
Abir Elzowidi, a relative of the Elzowidi family painfully describes the family’s final moments.
“A few days ago, five members of my family—including two small children 2 and 6 years old—were killed in their homes in that village of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, while baking their bread for the day wishing to share it together praying to God to spend one more day with each other while they watching Israel randomly bombing neighbors. Israel give them what they wished for! But sadly dead and buried next to each other. One child, a five-year old boy with special needs, lies injured in the hospital and has been left orphaned. The bread that they baked left soaking wet in their blood and my family kept picking up the hair and scalp and the little bodies of the two girls that was found in pieces. Now several other family members have been forced to leave their homes, and others watched their homes destroyed with this evil bombs and are homeless for the second time in their life after the 1948 ‘Nakba’, including my 2 grandmother Fatimah, 93 year-old and Aisha 84 years old. Why [do] they do this? What crime did my people commit for Israel to kill them?” she said.
So far, the blog has catalogued pictures of victims of Operation Protective Edge and Palestinians killed during sporadic attacks between May and July 2014. Submissions can be sent to HumanizePalestine@gmail.com.