The wind in northern Gaza no longer carries the smell of the sea. It drifts instead with the dust of collapsed walls and the acrid burn of homes that once held laughter. Inside one of those ruined homes sits Kholoud (21), a young artist, her world narrowed to an easel, a few jars of paint, and the constant hum of drones circling above.
Her latest painting leans against her Instagram wall, waiting to be sold. It may bring her family a little food, or perhaps a candle to paint by in the nights without power. “This is a piece of my soul,” she says. “Sometimes,” she explains quietly, “blood speaks louder than words.”
Kholoud’s brush moves within a reality that statistics alone can barely capture. Since October 2023, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has recorded more than 62,000 people killed and over 156,000 injured. Nearly every household has been touched by grief. In August 2025, the United Nations declared what many here already knew: Gaza has fallen into famine. By the end of September, projections estimate 640,000 people will be enduring famine conditions, the most extreme level of hunger. Already, at least approximately 269 people have died from malnutrition, including 112 children whose bodies gave up before their fifth birthdays. UNICEF recorded more than 13,000 cases of children treated for acute malnutrition in July alone, more than double the figure from the month before.
The collapse of daily life presses against Kholoud as she paints. Ninety-two percent of all homes in Gaza are damaged or destroyed, leaving families to crowd into tents or huddle in schoolyards. But even schools are no refuge: nearly every school building, about 92 percent now requires full reconstruction or major repairs. Almost the entire population, some 1.9 million people, has been displaced, many uprooted several times as bombardments shift from one neighborhood to the next
Electricity is gone, water treatment plants have ceased functioning, and raw sewage is funneled into the sea. Aid convoys arrive only in fragments, and hospitals, battered by over 770 attacks on health care, struggle with almost no fuel, no lab kits, and barely enough stabilization beds, just 43 in the entire Strip, for children suffering the severest form of malnutrition. Doctors speak of infants too weak to cry, of mothers watering down formula until it is nothing more than cloudy water, of insulin running out for thousands of diabetics.
It is in this suffocating silence that Kholoud paints. She works by the weak flicker of a candle or the dim glow of a battery lamp, sketching images that carry the weight of everything she sees but cannot always put into words. “When words fail, art speaks,” she says. “Every line holds what the media cannot carry,” she adds.
Her paintings have reached places she has never seen. However, she does not paint in the hope of leaving Gaza. She paints to make Gaza stay alive in memory and in conscience. “We live in this devastation; we don’t imagine it. Documenting it is defiance. My art is my voice when the world looks away,” she says
She pauses, resting the brush in her hand, and tries to describe what Gaza means to her. It is not just the place of her birth. It is her pulse. “Even broken and scarred, Gaza never falls apart,” she says . And then, as though the thought itself is fuel, she dips the brush into black paint and bends over the canvas once more, tracing the lines of another story no one else will tell.
