Malak Mattar
A life stolen before it had begun, 2023.
During the gen0cide, we watched dozens of premature babies removed from their incubators after a power failure. They were laid next to each other facing death at any minute because fuel and electricity had been prevented by the Occupa*ion from entering Al-Shifa Hospital.
At Al-Nasr hospital, the Occup*tion refused to allow premature babies to be transferred to the South, to where their families had been forced to evacuate. Their families had to say goodbye to them and leave them to die alone and decompose in their beds.
Some of these babies have names while others are simply marked “anonymous,” with no name, no family and no future.
Many have taken their last breath while being evacuated under bombardment from the North to the South and then to Egypt. Imagine the horrific traumatizing journey of a premature baby with no parents or proper medical care.
Such a thing has never before happened in History and one cannot imagine it happening again but the world let it happen.
Malak Mattar is a Palestinian artist, writer and illustrator from Gaza. She studied political science and international relations at Istanbul Aydin University, Turkey (2022). Her artwork drew interest from galleries and museums around the world during the assault on Gaza in 2014. She participated in individual and group exhibitions in Costa Rica, England, France, India, Palestine, Scotland, Spain, Holland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA. Malak illustrated and wrote her first book Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story. Her work can be found at her instagram here and We Are Not Numbers here
Image - Black and white watercolour and ink. Four babies with nappies on lay across each other.
Image supplied by and copyright to artist.
