The Guernica of Israel’s War of Extermination

PALESTINE ISRAEL GAZA GENOCIDE, 14 Jul 2025

Gideon Levy | Haaretz - TRANSCEND Media Service

“Guernica” is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most powerful anti-war painting in history.  Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Pablo Picasso painted his famous picture in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 Apr 1937. We now have a modern filmed version from Gaza. The people of Guernica, which was bombed by fascists and Nazis during the Spanish Civil War, urged the international community to share the suffering of the Palestinian people who are reeling under relentless Israeli bombing.

13 Jul 2025 – First, you hear the screams, the kind that makes your blood run cold. The camera then moves in as the street swirls with dust and debris from the bombing. The first image is of a small group of mothers and babies clinging to one another. One of the mothers lies on her back, seemingly already dead. Another crouches over her lifeless baby, sprawled on the sidewalk. A third clutches her baby – it’s impossible to tell if he is alive or dead – as an older woman sits beside her, dazed and silent.

A man calls out to the grieving woman: “Enough, enough!” But she answers him with a scream of pure anguish. The camera glides slowly across the street, settling on the prostrate bodies of two young men. Could they be the fathers? It then drifts toward two more piles of corpses, then jerks away, as if unable to endure the sight. One teen lies prone, two others are face-up; all three appear to be dead. A bicycle lies abandoned at the roadside. A father bends over the body of his infant child.

Someone makes his way between the bodies. “Al-Tiyara,” he says, meaning the plane that dropped the bombs. A boy lies with his face pressed to the asphalt, blood running from his head. His hand quivers in one final spasm of life. The red pool beneath him spreads steadily. Two women lie curled together on the curb, almost like spoons. Between them rests the body of a little girl.

The voice of the man recording is heard. He speaks to a woman cradling her infant daughter: “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re all right.” He’s trying to calm the mother holding her baby – just murdered – in her arms. The woman stares at her unresponsive daughter, then looks up at him and asks helplessly, “What happened to her?”

In the background, another man’s voice calls out: “Is there a car here to take them?” while another man shouts for help, crying: “Look over here!” A woman clutching her toddler screams: “He needs an ambulance! Please take him, his hand was severed.” The man recording the scene tells her, “Lay him down on the ground.”

Across the street, the bodies of two young men lie sprawled on their backs. Dressed in rags, their shoes torn, one with a mangled leg. Their arms are outstretched, mouths agape – perhaps they had time to cry for help.

Not far away, a teenage girl lies prostrate, her body stretched across the sidewalk, her legs spilling into the street. She is dead. A terrified toddler buries his face in his mother’s lap. Nearby, another mother sits clutching her baby’s lifeless body on her knees. She wails in anguish, her eyes pleading, her body rocking as she cries out – each movement jolting the tiny corpse. The baby’s head drops like that of a doll. Perhaps she is trying to shake him back to life, but it’s in vain.

A woman lies on the road, resting her head on the curb. Her child lies beside her, blood still running from his head. Just moments before, his body gave a final, faint movement. The mother presses her face against his, as if trying to breathe in his last breath. The air is thick with relentless, bloodcurdling screams – women and children crying out in a haunting chorus of pain and terror.

No one tends to the wounded: There’s no one left to help them. Soon, the dead and wounded will be loaded onto donkey carts and taken to the ruins of the nearest hospital, Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Guernica. Guernica in Deir al Balah last Thursday. Fifteen people killed, including 10 infants and children and three mothers. The site: an infant-formula distribution station, the local well-baby clinic.

Pablo Picasso painted his famous picture in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.

These videos, which CNN and other news outlets reported receiving, are the Guernica of Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza. Every Israeli must see this Guernica. Yet almost no Israeli has seen it, and almost no Israeli ever will. In Neve Ilan, home to Israel’s Channel 12 and and Channel 13 news studios, the propagandists and brainwashers have decided that Israelis don’t need to witness the genocide in Gaza. This decision, too, will be called journalism.

Source: HAARETZ

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 Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.

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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 14 Jul 2025.

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