The horror of Rafah in the cartoons by Ortolani and Natangelo: “These images must be seen”
"A headless child. This is 2024. This is the planet I live on. On which no one learns anything", they write on social media
ROME – “We should all hold that child in our arms“. This is one of the thousands of comments under the posts of two Italian cartoonists who reported the horror of Rafah on paper and on social media. Mario Natangelo and Leo Ortolani have ‘poured’ into a drawing one of the most terrible images that have come to us from Gaza: a man holding a burnt and headless child (perhaps his son) in his arms. That child is one of the victims of the attack by the Israeli air force on the strip of Gazalast night which bombed the tent city north-west of the town, ina humanitarian area on the border with Egypt.
“I talk about this stuff every day, wars and deaths, I have never hidden my opinions. But I try not to look certain images, those images there, because they get stuck in my head and don’t go away – writes one of the cartoonists, Natangelo – This morning a video treacherously opened up for me: a man was seen in Rafah after the latest Israeli raid . It showed the body of a mutilated child, shaking it left and right as if it were a doll. The head was missingIt was a few seconds before I could close it. Yet that image stuck in my head and I tried chasing her away all day. Until I saw that a designer – Leo Ortolani – had drawn it, or rather reversed it onto the paper, perhaps moved by the same instinct that instead led me to throw it back down. And I understood that that image needed to be seen. And I redesigned it too. That image must be seen and if not in video, or in photos, at least in drawing”.
Here’s what Ortolani wrote in his post: “There are videos and images of a new raid carried out by the Israeli army on a refugee camp of Palestinians who took refuge there at the request of the Israeli government itself. ‘Go there, so you don’t get bombed in Rafah’.
And then, with the excuse that it was a Hamas base, he bombed them. 35 civilians dead. Curtains burned. Burnt bodies. In the indifference that all this arouses in the rest of the world, I am struck by this man who holds and shows what at first glance might seem like a broken doll.
He is a headless child. A headless, burned child. I’ve been seeing horrors like this for months. Horrors about children. The genocide of the Palestinians continues for months.
I can’t get used to these images. Sorry, Israeli army. I don’t get used to it. I can not make it. I don’t know how you do it. A headless child. This is 2024. This is the planet I live on. Which no one learns anything about. Don’t comment. It is not by commenting below that the genocide will stop.
But if you have the power to stop it, even just to move something, do it“.