Through drawing, young Palestinian women combat trauma in Gaza City port

Gaza.- The port of the city of Gaza, which during the more than two years of Israeli offensive against the Strip has served as a refuge and resting space for tens of thousands of Palestinians, is also now the place where many young people gather to process their reality through painting.

On plastic tables and chairs set up on the promenade of Gaza’s capital or on its breakwater, about 40 young women draw under the sun: tents, watermelons, other women or, several of them, the panoramic view of the sky and the sea.

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“It’s a girls’ initiative. We come to draw, to release energy, to express our Palestinian identity, we put on paper what we kept inside during the war,” says Yudi al Hayek, 15, one of the participants, to EFE. Despite the ceasefire in effect since last October, Yudi speaks while the buzzing of one of the drones with which the Israeli Army flies over and monitors the Gaza Strip daily can be heard in the distance. The teenager says she chooses to spend her time at the port of Gaza City “because it’s the only thing that has remained firm, that hasn’t changed in all the attacks, in everything that happened in Gaza. It’s the only thing that remained the same.”

While the view towards the interior shows the devastation of a city subjected to daily bombings (and which was the target of the last Israeli ground operation before the ceasefire), those who gather on the promenade of the capital and look west only find the calm of the Mediterranean.

The initiative, dubbed “Breathe and Paint,” stems from an idea a 21-year-old shared with her friends in a WhatsApp group, spreading to other participants.

Everyone goes to the port on their own from different points in Gaza City, without any international organization or NGO being behind the plan.

This is the second time Yudi participates in these meetings. The first time, she remembers, she painted the sea. The second is the image of a woman wrapped in a kufiya (the classic headscarf of the Levantine Arab countries, with significant political weight in Palestine). She is also wrapped in oranges, olive trees, and butterflies.

An initiative for women

Ahmed al Halabi, 22 years old, walks among the tables and touches up some of the drawings. He, who also dedicates himself to art, is one of the volunteers working in the organization of “Breathe and paint”. “Nowadays, for most artists present in Gaza, there are no places where they can start drawing, because the (Israeli) occupation destroyed all their art workshops, and even those in their homes,” he explains. “We try to attract women to express their feelings, release their energy from all the suffering they have endured in this war, all the responsibilities they have taken on,” she continues. During the war, 95% of businesses that employed women closed, according to United Nations data, and around 320,000 Palestinian women (out of a population of 2.1 million people) had to stop their studies. In early October 2025, the UN estimated that one in seven families in Gaza were headed by a woman, as more than 16,000 had lost their husbands during the offensive, having to “bear the double burden of grief and responsibility, caring for children, managing the home alone and making life-or-death decisions alone, amidst hunger, displacement and the collapse of services”.