If you enter the name of the 22-year-old Palestinian artist Duniyana Al-Amour on Facebook, you will find messages of condolence and many of her paintings. Young people in particular have shared them. The young woman from the town of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip died in one of the first Israeli attacks in the recent Middle East conflict. This was reported by the New York art magazine Hyperallergic.
One of the paintings shows Al-Amour himself. The self-portrait shows a serious and obviously young face peeking out from behind a wooden wall, only the left side of the face is visible. It is not known when Al-Amour painted the picture. It is her most shared work on social media.
“We were sitting in our front yard when we suddenly heard gunfire from the Israeli military watchtowers near the separation fence east of Khan Yunis, followed by a large explosion of a tank shell,” said family member Mohammad Al-Amour. And further: “We rushed to the shelled house and found that Duniyana Al-Amour had died immediately from shrapnel.”
Israel: Deaths in Gaza also from misguided PIJ rockets
On Friday, the Israeli military launched several attacks on the radical Palestinian organization Islamic Jihad (PIJ). After the targeted killing of the organization’s military chief, Taisir Al-Jabaris, the PIJ in turn fired rockets at Israeli cities and thus at civilians. According to Israeli media reports, more than 60 rockets reached the country by midnight. But while the missile defense system there was able to intercept almost all missiles, the attacks in Gaza also hit civilians. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 15 children and four women were among the dead before the ceasefire came into force on Sunday evening. One of them was Duniyana Al-Amour. A total of 44 people died as a result of the attacks on Gaza – according to Israel, also due to misguided PIJ rockets.
Al-Amour studied fine arts at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. The 22-year-old is another victim of the recently escalating Middle East conflict. Experts attribute the fact that the escalation did not take on even more dramatic proportions to the fact that the PIJ received no military support from Hamas, which is dominant in Gaza. The round of escalation has now ended for the time being due to a shaky ceasefire. But it seems only a matter of time before Tel Aviv’s alarm sirens will go off again. A solution to the conflict is still a long way off.