In the hills of South Hebron, words painted on fragile walls speak of dignity, loss, and refusal. British artist Alex joins Palestinian communities in the village of Khallet at Daba’a to create bold, simple murals on homes marked for demolition, a quiet yet urgent form of resistance that asks us not to look away.
The car struggles up the rocky slope, jolting from side to side at every turn, threatening to skid off the path. Mohammad handles the wheel with confidence—he knows these roads like the palm of his hand, he was born and raised here. After one final jolt, the village of Khallet at Daba’a appears, just above the hill. One house materializes, then another. The buildings are simple—concrete rectangles with tin roofs, like those you’d draw as a kid. But the firm or shape of the buildings is not the first thing that catches the eye. What immediately stands out are the huge, clear block letters painted on each home: “We deserve life,” “This is a home just like yours,” “Not one step back,” “A family lives here,” “We will rebuild,” they read. And then lines in Arabic poetry. It’s a community of plain truths, printed in bold across its walls—statements so basic, yet so painfully simple in that context. The houses in my memories from just a few months back, so fresh I can still see them, no longer stand. All that remains are ruins. And the words painted on them — now fragmented—are scattered among the rubble.
Khallet at Daba’a is a small Palestinian village in the Masafer Yatta region, in West Bank’s south Hebron hills. Home to a community of more than 200 people, Khallet at Daba’a has been almost completely wiped out in recent months – Israeli authorities and local extremist settlers saw to it, with every means possible. Since February 2025, the whole region, whose population has lived under both military and civil Israeli control since the Oslo agreements, has been heavily targeted with settlers’ violence, demolitions and arbitrary arrests. Khallet at Daba’a also happens to be inside an Israeli-imposed so-called “firing zone”, a military training zone. Yet, firing zones, as local activist Ali Awad explains, “are only artificially created as a further means to push Palestinians out of their lands”. Palestinian homes inside firing zones are more easily targeted and can be demolished at any time. With as little as an arbitrary military order, entire villages can be turned to rubble as happened in the case of Khallet at Daba’a.
Yet, the local community, who embraced nonviolent resistance decades ago, in the early 1990s, is refusing to abandon their lands and surrender to the ethnic cleansing process. Culture and art are a crucial aspect of this fight too. Local nonviolent resistance movement Youth of Sumud collaborates daily with local, international and Israeli activists on the ground, while also developing compelling storytelling to raise awareness about the situation in Masafer Yatta globally. Among other projects, to achieve this goal, a first documentary, Sarura, was filmed in 2022, followed by world-renowned No Other Land, which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2025. Despite the wide circulation of No Other Land, however, the situation on the ground remains dire.
Alex – who prefers not to reveal his full name or identity – is a British painter and sculptor as well as a self-employed carpenter. Since 2022, he has been volunteering in Masafer Yatta, both actively supporting local activists in their practices of nonviolent interposition and producing collaborative artworks in the form of large murals painted on Palestinians homes, especially on those with a demolition order – the pieces on Khallet at Daba’a’s houses were his. «The idea, » he explains «is to paint simple and straightforward sentences on the homes that are at risk of being demolished, to convey a simple and powerful message». A message that becomes even stronger once the houses that the pieces are painted on are demolished. Far from leaning towards alienating highbrow art, Alex’s artworks are powerful, simple and raw, straight to the point. They are designed and made both for the local community and an international audience: to try and get across a sense of the violations of human rights – such as the right to housing – that Palestinians endure daily in the region, without overcomplicating the message. The geopolitical situation may be complex and multi-layered, but some things just aren’t – Searching back to the very essence of the practice of mural painting, Alex’s art makes his murals visible, plain, just down to the bone, to create a human connection. To date, since 2022, he has realized more than 30 pieces – most of which were destroyed at least once.
When and how did the project first start? What is the purpose of the murals and how do you try to convey it?
The first time I went to Masafer Yatta was in 2022, toward the end of the year. It was before the war started. I went as a volunteer and activist, I was doing nonviolent interposition, spending time with the families, either chaperoning them during the day as they were doing their pastoral or agricultural work or working with them on rebuilding demolished houses. That first time for instance we were digging a lot of caves. But I also found there was a lot of spare time in between, where you might just be watching on hills or doing nothing – which of course has its own value, but I wanted to use as much of the time I had there effectively. And of course, everything we do there is Palestinian led, so I shared my idea with the local community and Palestinian activists – they liked it, and so it started. So far, we have painted sentences in Arabic, English, Irish, and even in Spanish. The most powerful ones are probably those written in English as they are more effective in communicating the meaning to the audience, which is mostly international. I suppose what we are trying to do is find a new way to communicate. I also think that maybe the news has been saturated with a lot of these horrific and disturbing images recently, and so have our media, our films and our games, so people don’t really respond to it anymore, or they switch off because it terrifies them, which is understandable.
Trying to use these big, blunt phrases is a clean and accessible way to communicate an idea, without alienating people watching at the same time. So, especially for the English ones, the goal was to keep them quite clean and simple: nothing that makes you feel like you are the slowest person in the room, or nothing that’s going to make you feel inferior to the conversation. Because so often it’s a very difficult conflict and situation to wrap your head around with years of stuff that has happened, years of these horrific events, and so often people are scared off by it. But, as complicated as the history is, there are also a lot of things that are very clear and uncomplex about it – and I think to try and find a personal angle to communicate them has been helpful. For instance, I think my favourite piece is on the house of a man called Abbas: we did an Arabic one on one side, an English one on the other and we wrote, “this is a home just like yours”, as if to say: it may not look like your home, but it’s a home just like yours: a place where you raise your family, where you fight, where you make up, where you wash the dishes, where you read a book. It all holds the same meaning: it’s things that you can recognise and associate with, even as someone in a different country. The purpose is trying to draw that human connection with what’s happening to these people thousands of miles away. I just wanted a blunt clear blood way to tell the stories of people who are under daily attack, with art that does not distract from telling the story.
How does the choice of the sentences painted on the houses work? And the actual painting process?
It always depends. There are a few sentences that maybe I have been thinking of for a while, that I think may be appropriate, or some that are thought of as part of bigger campaign. In those cases, I would ask the suggest these to the people that agreed to have a wall of their houses painted, and if they agreed we would go with that. But often I would sit down with them, often spending a lot of time with them, and they would tell me about what’s been happening to them, something specific about their family or maybe something they love – and then, based on that, we can create a sentence together. Some other times still it’s poetry lines, mostly from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. It is about putting what they want to say on the wall as well.
As for the painting itself, I think it’s really important to involve the people as much as possible. Sometimes they don’t want to and they’d rather me just do it, and that’s also ok. But wherever possible, I will try to involve especially whoever’s house it is. Often the kids love getting involved. They will come and jump all around and then once they get permission to do it from their parents, they get very excited and enthused and they do a really good job. And it’s nice for them to feel they’re a part of this thing: it’s not just a random bunch of foreigners coming through and painting whatever on their house. For painting, we use whatever paint we can find, I just stick to a traditional graffiti style, where you use a large roller, then a half-sized roller, and that gives you quite good proportions. I had never done graffiti before, and I wanted to keep it simple, so that anyone can participate.
Since the pieces are done on houses, what is their relationship to the private and public space?
A lot of the houses there are funded by European groups and commissions, so you get these tin sheds, or these little concrete block and tin roof sheds that we’re so used to seeing out there. They are very standard, and don’t reflect anything of the local culture or the people who live in them. It is quite nice to have something of their own, something that they chose and made on the walls, so that people can, in a way, put their voices on there. Of course, there are also some concerns – like the fact that the paintings might make the houses more of a target, but so far people have always been happy to engage and send a message through these artworks. They accept the risk – saying that the houses are always targets anyway.
Each one is designed to send a message. I did four more when I was there this winter. The last one I did is a big mural, even bigger than usual, on the Guest House in the village of At-Tuwani which is at risk of being demolished, and it’s also a special place of meetings for the community. It reads simply: “Will you sit and watch?”. It is always about making a call to action on top of reporting on the situation. Again, in this case, it is nothing flamboyant, just blunt like that, and that’s in massive letters on the side of the guest house looking over the village. We worked out all of the different roofs that we can film from to capture this piece going down, so when there’s a digger going through the building, or it collapses, that phrase then will be present in all of the reports as well: whether that’s someone reporting against or for the demolition, no one will be able to avoid getting the work in there.
What happens when a house really does get demolished? How does it feel to see the pieces scattered?
It’s very difficult to witness, although it’s been in my mind that this would happen, and this is why I’m here. But you’re always hoping it won’t really happen. I just try to make sure that if it does happen, we achieve the goal of making sure it’s witnessed and seen and documented so it’s like if someone gets the picture and gets that video, then as long as we can try and organise and work towards stopping this from happening again and using whatever media and avenues we have to do this is important. It’s very difficult after too, to speak with the people: there’s not so much you can really say to them after their house is gone. I’m constantly amazed by how composed they are after such events, be it death in the family from the occupation or demolition or being attacked. The way they hold themselves afterwards. Their resolve is incredible. I remember when we went back for the second time in 2023, towards the end of my stay a group of settlers had come and smashed one of the walls that had some slogans on it. The wall was all in bits and rubble, but we could still see all the blocks that had the painting on them, so me and the kids from the village organised all the blocks, cleaned off the old cement, ordered them and put them back in place like a puzzle. We then rebuilt the wall with fresh cement, pointed it, and then the whole thing was put back together as it was, save a few blocks that were unusable. Then we repainted it afresh. And that’s when we moved to red and did a big bold phrase on the wall afterwards. I think this is a nice process for them to go through, because this was the house they lived in. Another man’s house, Amir’s was destroyed seven times in six years. The first time I came back after his house was destroyed, I was talking to him and he said, “this will be my home again”, so we pasted up a picture of his fantastic son Ali on the wall and wrote a sentence saying “this was a home,” and then “this will be a home again” in nice clear letters on the rubble of that building. The next year I came back, he had rebuilt the house, and dug a cave, it looked fantastic. It was a home again. I saw they had kept a piece of the original wall that had survived the previous demolition: it was the head of the kid in the photo. But then this year, going back, all of that progress was completely gone again, and they’d not only destroyed the house, but the cave beneath it as well, and filled it in, and the bit that I saw, the same head of the kid that was on the wall, that we pasted up three years ago, we found in the rubble, you could see a bit of the kid’s head left. I’d rather these images didn’t exist, but I guess the imagery is quite powerful in that regard, to see it in amongst the rubble. It created a meaningful timeline, that says a lot about what these people have to endure. I wish that it would never complete itself as a piece. I suppose most of the work in Khallet At Daba’a is gone now, but I this just vitalises you, and makes you want to do more.
LINK
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-7rr8xBYig
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masafer_Yatta
- TINA DION - October 2, 2026
- Laila Ajjawi: “Something a girl was not supposed to do” - June 19, 2026
- The Art Biennale is alive and well - May 22, 2026
