While mailboxes overflow with words of celebration for an approaching holiday, a question echoes on everyone’s lips: “In what condition have you returned, O Eid?”—the poetic cry once uttered by Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi at the start of his elegy steeped in sorrow and gloom. He composed it in Aleppo, under the patronage of Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani, at a time of personal anguish, and he wrote:
In what condition have you returned, O Eid? As before, or bringing something new indeed?
Such was the cry of a poet—and what a poet!—and today, as I open my inbox, I find the cry of an artist—and what an artist!
Abdel Razek Okasha
“Wishing you all the best, to those whose hearts still beat and whose conscience never sleeps. Remember well: the bombing of a hospital, the killing of an infant who never tasted milk, and the rape of a homeland in full view of the world— these are not passing headlines. They are crimes against humanity.
They—those who craft deception—succeeded in shaping an international law called anti-Semitism, while we succeeded in singing songs of condemnation from beneath our blankets, where silence warms us and each of us wraps themselves in the shame of the world, watching the spilled blood as if it were the scent of poured musk.
Happy Eid to the children of silence, to the prisoners of shame.
In truth, the only ones who deserve our greetings are those who bled so that we might live: the martyrs, the saints, the people of Palestine.
And the real Eid shall come… the Eid of victory. Because humanity, though silenced for a while, will not remain silent forever in the face of these crimes.”
These were the words of Egyptian artist Abdel Razek Okasha, who has lived more than half his life in Paris, yet never forgot his Arab identity, his cause, and his belonging. Just as he painted for Palestine abroad, he now resists illness at home, continuing to create his latest body of work—among them a powerful painting titled “Genocide: The Al-Ahli Hospital.” A massive acrylic on canvas (2 × 2 meters).
The title “Genocide: The Al-Ahli Hospital” carries a direct weight of pain and protest. It doesn’t hide behind metaphor; it boldly declares itself as a visual testimony to a full-fledged crime. The deliberate use of the word genocide places us squarely in the heart of the event, not as a fleeting incident, but as a collective extermination.
This painting belongs to the school of contemporary expressionism—not aimed at photographic realism, but at conveying human tragedy through splintered color, fragmented form, and emotionally charged linework.
The artist deploys a sharp, symbolic triadic palette: blue, red, and black. Red—the color of blood—pours from bodies, from eyes, from the void itself, as if bleeding cannot be stopped. It shrouds tiny corpses in their cradles. Blue—abundant and cold—represents death’s chill, enveloping corpses stretched on gurneys, or spirits suspended between sky and earth. Black dominates—the moral and spiritual darkness cloaking a world that remains silent in the face of atrocity.
Okasha employs a dynamic, undulating style, where forms repeat and shatter across a vast square canvas. It evokes the chaos after the blast, the merging of screams with silence, pain with shock. There is no singular focal point; rather, overlapping centers emerge: a stunned face, a lifeless child, a bent elder, women sitting with bundles of death in their laps, a woman embracing a shadow. This composition generates a horrifying visual chaos—the chaos of indiscriminate death.
Acrylic, with its fast-drying properties, is used here to produce a dripping effect. The paint appears to bleed off the bodies, to stream from the brush, just as truth bleeds from the human tragedy depicted.
All are victims. In this painting, victimhood appears in myriad forms: Infants wrapped in white gauze streaked with red—evoking both medical bandages and funeral shrouds. Women, their features erased by grief, become shadows of screams no one will hear. Men with bowed backs hold or support bodies, as if bearing the collapsing memory of a nation. Eyes do not meet the viewer but drift into voids, or vanish entirely—as if even the dead can no longer face what has befallen them.
We, the viewers, witness their pain in silence. We stand with the painting’s victims—yet we too are victims, unseen, awaiting our turn to be painted.
On October 17, 2023, the Al-Ahli (Baptist) Hospital in Gaza was struck by a deadly airstrike that killed hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children. The hospital had been a refuge for those fleeing the Israeli assault. The massacre shocked the world and stands as a documented war crime against humanity and the Palestinian people.
This painting is part of a body of testimonial works. The artist does not merely depict the event—he paints his inner wound in response to it. He does not offer us a story but a visual cry. Every detail reveals an artist who is shaken, enraged, devastated. That’s what gives the work its overwhelming power. This is not merely a visual document of the Al-Ahli massacre—it is a symbolic act of resistance.
Okasha here moves beyond traditional aesthetics into what might be called the aesthetics of human rage. This painting puts the world on trial, condemns its silence, and says—through the language of color—what words could never fully express.
