Stitch by stitch, an Israeli artist confronts the destruction of Gaza

Avshalom Halutz writes in Haaretz on 23 June 2026:

Israeli artist and political activist Rachel Hagigi remembers exactly what she was doing in September 2023. “I was sitting at home embroidering a horse for a cushion. Just a horse.” It was the first time she had embroidered in about ten years. But soon the act of embroidery would move from horses onto very different subjects.

October 7 happened, and shortly afterward the devastation in Gaza began. “At first I avoided looking at images of atrocities, both from October 7 and from Gaza. I thought it would scar me. They were snuff films, and I didn’t want to participate in that culture.”

At the same time she felt paralyzed. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t listen to music. I sat at home in a state of shock, embroidering, and I realized it was the only thing I was capable of doing.”

But avoiding news flashes and photographs from Gaza was impossible. The main images at the time were tanks moving in and airstrikes from a distance. “You didn’t see people, you didn’t see the horror itself just yet. You saw a frame of an explosion, and there was something visually striking about it. I remember thinking: this is insane. There’s such a gap between the aesthetic appearance of these images and the horror hidden inside them.”

By playing with the medium, rendering images into textile works, Hagigi’s works force viewers to examine the way we look at other people’s suffering through photography.  Hagigi began collecting photos of Gaza taken by photojournalists, looking for ways to translate them into embroidery. “Everything began from a place of intense emotion, and only later did I start understanding what I was doing and what it meant. At first there was no intellectual framework. My mind had basically melted.”

An exhibition entitled “Blackout” showcasing 11 of Hagigi’s embroideries based on the pictures she converted, alongside other works by the artist, is currently on view at the Mamuta Art and Research Center in Jerusalem. The titles of the works are the dates of the bombings they depict.

By playing with the medium, rendering images into textile works, Hagigi’s works force viewers to examine the way we look at other people’s suffering through photography.

“Today we’re flooded with images. Everything is right in front of our faces all the time,” she says. “There are too many images, they’re moving too quickly, and very little attention is paid to any one of them. When I choose a single photograph and spend months embroidering it, I’m forcing the viewer to also slow down and stay with that image.”

After a few weeks of research, Hagigi found a website that converted images into pixels and colors. “I realized as I worked on the images that I was cutting away almost the entire city. I wanted to focus on the cloud created by the explosion. The city remains as a hint, but the bombing itself becomes the subject. The cloud. During most of the process I could barely see the image itself. It becomes abstract.”

This isn’t Hagigi’s first political project dealing with the Israeli occupation. In 2022, together with artist and designer Nawal Arafat, she created Shawari’a Yafa (“Streets of Jaffa”) which preserves the memory of Jaffa’s original Arabic street names by installing Arabic signs alongside their Hebrew counterparts.

How did you search for the images?

“Google. And not only images from the current genocide. I looked at photographs from 2009, from 2014, from many different years. The work isn’t focused only on the bombings of the last three years. For me it’s all part of the same story. Gaza has been undergoing a continuous process of destruction.

“Since 2023, no independent journalists have been allowed into Gaza. Many of the images come from Gazan photographers working with international news agencies. The Israeli military has only allowed journalists to enter Gaza along routes it controls. It decides what they get to see.

Why not simply show the original photographs?

“It wasn’t an intellectual decision. It came from intuition. There’s something about the gap between the speed, the brutality, of dropping a bomb and the extreme slowness and attentiveness of embroidery. They’re opposite ends of a spectrum. Labor, patience and delicacy on the one hand, and brutality on the other.

“The works are embroidered as tapestries. Tapestries are usually romantic. And that gap exists here as well. The works can appear beautiful, even impressive, but what they depict is destruction and death. What I do notice is the reaction people have to the work. They say, ‘Wow, this is incredible,’ and then immediately they become uncomfortable. They shrink back. They’re horrified.”

More broadly, what do you think about making art at a time like this?

“Honestly, I don’t really understand how it’s possible to make art today that ignores what’s happening. Israeli artists who choose not to engage with it in their work – I don’t understand that. During a genocide. To me, Israeli artists who don’t speak about it is collaborating with it. That’s how sharply I see it. But then again, I don’t really understand this society anymore.”

The section of the article which covers Rachel Hagigi’s work is reproduced in its entirety