"Art can play an important role in supporting children’s healthy development during conflicts and emergencies." UNRWA works

Friends Lareen (left) and Layan (right) exhibited their artwork at UNRWA’s Asmaa Shelter in Gaza City. © June 2026 UNRWA PhotoThe children's art was exhibited in five temporary spaces across the Gaza Strip. © June 2026 UNRWA PhotoA total of 250 children

 UNRWA

@UNRWA

Through art, Lareen and Layan are finding ways to express their thoughts, hopes and emotions. 

They were among 1,000 children in #Gaza who took part in UNRWA-supported art activities that provided a safe and encouraging space for creativity and self-expression. 

With support from the European Union, these activities help children explore their talents and share their stories. 

Read the full story: https://unrwa.org/newsroom/photos/paint-paper-and-pencils-help-children-gaza-strip-cope-trauma-and-loss 

 #UNRWAworks  

#FundUNRWA 

https://x.com/UNRWA/status/2108561074555424976 

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine] 

Paint, paper, and pencils help children in the Gaza Strip cope with trauma and loss

02 September 2026

A steady sound of voices fills UNRWA’s Asmaa shelter-turned-exhibition space in Beach Camp in Gaza City. As people move through the crowded room, they pause to smile, point, and take photos of the colourful artwork that brightens the once-white walls. Standing among them are 11-year-old friends Lareen and Layan. The young students-turned-artists proudly show off their posters and upcycled cardboard figures.

"I love drawing flowers," says Layan. "One day, I want to become an architect."

Alongside 1,000 other children living in UNRWA shelters across the Gaza Strip, the young friends have participated in art activities organised by the Agency. Under the supervision and guidance of UNRWA psychosocial counsellors, the students have learned how to express their thoughts, aspirations, and emotions through art, creating posters, drawings, artistic models, and sculptures.

"We were so happy to participate. We collected things from around us and learned how to turn them into something beautiful. We made new friends and spent time together in a healthy environment, away from the destruction around us," says Lareen, who is among the 250 children selected to exhibit their art in one of the five temporary exhibition spaces across the Gaza Strip.

The art activities and exhibitions were made possible through funding from European Union Humanitarian Aid, which provided the paint, paper, and other materials needed for drawing, colouring, and crafting, as well as the psychosocial support that helped create a safe and encouraging environment for the participants.

Art can play an important role in supporting children’s healthy development during conflicts and emergencies. Through art, they learn how to express complex emotions they might otherwise find difficult to articulate, while strengthening their confidence and fostering a sense of normalcy. For children in the Gaza Strip, opportunities to learn, play, and express themselves have been disrupted by more than two years of war, repeated displacement, and the loss of loved ones.

Wael, an UNRWA focal point for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in the Gaza Strip, has witnessed how the art activities have made a difference.

“The children transformed their feelings, experiences, and aspirations into powerful artworks that speak of both their struggles and their hope for a better future. The initiative gave them a voice, while strengthening their well-being and helping them rebuild hope in the most challenging circumstances.”

The project also attracted older children eager to develop their artistic talents.

For 16-year-old UNRWA school graduate Khadija, living in the Asmaa shelter in Beach Camp, art became a means of documenting the realities faced by children in the Gaza Strip. Having lost both her home and her brother during the war, she used her artwork to reflect on the experiences that continue to shape her community.

"I saw a child whose arms had been amputated playing hopscotch in the street," she recalls. "These are the real losses in life, the moments of joy that disappear. We have been deprived of everything. I want to express the suffering of the children..." READ MORE  https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/photos/paint-paper-and-pencils-help-children-gaza-strip-cope-trauma-and-loss

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Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness. Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousnes: "Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family. Lost lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank. CHOKE POINTS "

https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2107786279320482146 

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

 

Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. 

Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness.  

Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousness:  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere] 

Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family.

Lost lives.

How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.

CHOKE POINTS  

The Big Story

Sep 30, 2026 6:00 AM

Aref Jaber is on a neighbor's roof, trying to get home.

At 51, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door. He has no choice. Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint 160, is the only way in or out for the 140 families who live there.

But Checkpoint 160 is closed again; Jaber is not sure why. The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region—it could be anything.

For the last three years, he says, this has happened at least two days a week. So the community has devised a system of alternative routes. Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through. They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs. “When I finally get home,” he says, “it feels like I’ve achieved something monumental.”

The enclosure of Jaber’s neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank—for Palestinians, that is. At the same time that deadly Israeli settler violence robs communities in the West Bank of their land, and amid the genocide in Gaza, Israel has expanded its infrastructures of military control and domination... READ MORE  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

What is Fringe ... a poem by Anne Selden Annab

 

       What is Fringe

What is fringe-

used to be

abolitionists

used to be

fair wages

used to be

used to be

used to be

freedom

and

ohhhhhh sooooo much more we take for granted now...

human rights

voting rights

equality

diversity

respect

the rule of fair and just laws

used to be.

                                                                                                poem copyright ©2026 Anne Selden Annab 

Minamanne- Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine

 

minamanne

Church of the Nativity

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine (photo 1945) Image source: Library of Congress

This image of a Palestinian woman in her Malaka thobe, standing above the Church of the Nativity, is familiar to many Palestinians. When I see these pre-Nakba images I always think about the people in them. Who was she? What was her name, her story? I wonder how she lived through the Nakba just a few years later, how she carried the weight of memory and loss. Did she get to stay in Palestine, or was she displaced like so many of us?

"My grandfather kept the key to his house in Yaffa in 1948. He thought they would return in a few days. His name was Hasan. The house was destroyed. Others built a new one in its place. Hasan died in Gaza in 1986. The key has rusted but still exists somewhere, longing for the old wooden door." Mosab Abu Toha ... From Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mosab Abu Toha

@MosabAbuToha

 

I cannot believe I left our house on October 13, 2023 and never grabbed the only photo of my grandfather I had. I cannot believe I never took the photo of my father when was a very young man. 

 

You can see my father’s photo behind the Gaza wooden piece. He is on the left putting oranges in boxes. 

 

Our house was bombed on Oct. 28. The only dear thing I took was my own copy of my poetry book. It was stupid of me, I admit, to take something I could replace, though nothing can be really replaced.

A conversation in a cafe

 

Mosab Abu Toha 

  ·

"Two days ago, I was meeting with three Gazan friends in a cafe when a man in his early fifties joined us.

 

Abu Fadi was a bus driver from Rafah.

 

I asked him where he was staying in Cairo. “Downtown. I got out of Gaza a few days ago.”

 

I asked him whether his wife and children were with him.

 

“No, I’m by myself here.”

 

My friend Ahmad, a novelist who left Gaza just last week, prodded me in my thigh, asking me for my Egyptian phone number.

 

A minute later, I got an SMS from Ahmad:

 

This man lost his wife, children, and grandchildren in an airstrike."

Every Palestinian's Impossible Choices

 

A Palestinian refugee family... 1948 Palestine/Israel-> Syria-> 2013 Lebanon, and in Lebanon they have had to move six times already

stateless: adjective
(of a person) not recognized as a citizen of any country.

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http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/features/what-was-lost

What Was Lost

Lebanon

With deep sadness and despair, Amal tells us that she is a teacher of the Arabic language; she’s not used to begging and asking for help. But given her current circumstances, she is ready to work in any field, even cleaning houses so that she and her daughter can live in dignity.

That’s been a challenge ever since she fled the conflict in Syria in April 2013, seeking safety in the Palestine refugee camp of Beddawi in northern Lebanon. She’s had to move six times already, from living with her husband's relatives to moving in with a friend whose house was in the conflict zone between the Tripoli neighbourhoods of Jebel Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh. Afraid of the shelling and bombing, Amal and her 8-year-old daughter fled again. “We did not leave Syria to save our lives and come here and die without a reason”, Amal says, back in Beddawi.

The tone of her voice rises and tears glisten in her eyes as she describes her pain and suffering. “It seems as though torture and displacement from one house to another are our destiny. I have lost my so-called dignity”, she says.

Amal’s husband returned to Syria to provide for his family, but she says their condition in Lebanon is one of “agony, pain and suffering.” Housing and living expenses are high, and UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) rental subsidies and food assistance “are unfortunately not enough” to offset the costs. “We get US$ 100 in rental subsidies and US$ 30 per person in food assistance,” she explains. “These amounts helped us survive a whole month when we were in Syria before the conflict, but in Lebanon they are sadly not enough.”

In Beddawi, Amal and her daughter have settled with the seven members of a Syrian refugee family. They share a room that does not even meet the lowest standards. There is no roof to protect them from the rain, but sunlight does not come in. They lack covers and sheets, even furniture.  Nonetheless, Amal declares that she “contributes in paying the rent, and my share is LBP 275,000 (US$ 180).”

Amal emphasizes that she still hangs on because of her daughter. The 8-year-old is enrolled in the UNRWA Al-Mazar school in Beddawi. After a moment of silence, Amal concludes, “We lost everything – our house and our money – but education is still available. It is the saviour of my daughter’s future and the most important thing in life.”

> More on Palestine refugees

April - August 1948: More than 700,000 Palestine refugees are displaced as a result of the Arab-Israeli War.

 Resolution 194

11th December 1948

The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 194 (III), resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

When UNWRA began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.