The artist Maisara Baroud never found living in Gaza easy. The Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed in 2007 after Hamas’s violent takeover of the territory, was suffocating, and Rimal, his middle-class neighbourhood in Gaza City, had not been spared from airstrikes in the previous wars with Israel.
Despite everything, he said, his family worked hard to establish a simple, quiet existence after being expelled from their village in what is now Israel in 1948. Baroud, 48, was a lecturer in the fine arts department at Al-Aqsa University, and he, his wife, Khansa, 47, and children Rita, 21, Ilya, 18, and Maria, 14, lived in a flat in the large family building shared with his mother, his siblings and their children. A docile cat and several songbirds completed their home life.
A restless sleeper, he liked to draw late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.
