Activists unfurl banner at Madrid museum to demand Gaza ceasefire

MADRID - Rights and environmental activists demanding a ceasefire in Gaza unfurled a giant picture of a Palestinian child crying for help above the entrance to Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum, home to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica that depicts the horrors of war.

On Jan 24, global campaigning group Greenpeace and the Unmute Gaza movement that supports photojournalists reporting from the war zone used a banner with an illustration by American artist Shepard Fairey based on an image taken by Gazan photographer Belal Khaled.

“Can you hear us?” read the caption, with “Ceasefire now” emblazoned below. Police and firefighters watched on without intervening.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October in response to an attack by Hamas, which runs the enclave.

The incursion led to the deaths of 1,200 people, with around 250 hostages captured, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health authorities, by a prolonged assault that has turned much of the enclave to a wasteland.

Picasso’s mural-sized work housed at the museum, inspired by a Nazi air raid on the northern Spanish town of Guernica in 1937 that killed as many as 1,600 people, is widely considered one of the anti-war masterpieces of 20th century art.

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