🔗 Heba Zagout, We Will Not Forget You
Killed in an IDF in an air strike on Gaza in October 13, 2023.
Zagout gained a dedicated following on Instagram from all around the world. Viewers responded to her vibrant paintings of cityscapes and portraits that documented aspects of Palestinian culture; I wrote and illustrated this comic to honor Heba and her art. As a Palestinian artist myself, I wanted to offer a fraction of her life and what her work meant to the people of the world.
But in working on this comic, the only thought running through my mind was: How can anyone possibly capture the scale and severity of this destruction, this dehumanization? With every minute, more and more Palestinian martyrs become statistics. I recalled the words of the writer Khalil in Gaza (@khalilo1): “If I were martyred, I would not want to be a number. Tell my name, hear my story, and pray for me. I am not a number. I am a complete planet.”