The Media Line: Artist Makes Her Own Ink, Potter Extracts Clay From Gaza Ruins 

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Artist Makes Her Own Ink, Potter Extracts Clay From Gaza Ruins 

Gazan Potter Jafar Atallah: “People don’t just need food. They need to live.”  

Giorgia Valente / The Media Line  

In the ruins of Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been reduced to ash and dust, survival is no longer measured only by food, water, or shelter. For some, survival has taken on another meaning—preserving dignity, memory, and identity through creation. 

 Amid bombed-out streets, shattered homes, and endless displacement, a potter and an artist are carving out fragile islands of resilience using nothing but earth, pigment, and human connection.  

For Jafar Atallah, a potter displaced from northern Gaza to the central Strip, the war erased decades of work in a matter of moments. His family’s pottery factory—once a source of multi-generational livelihood and tradition—was totally wiped out.  

“Before the war, we had a full pottery factory in northern Gaza,” Atallah told The Media Line. “It was completely destroyed. After I was displaced to central Gaza, I opened a small workshop in the area where I am now living. I had to build new machinery by myself just to continue producing pottery,” he added.  

With Gaza’s crossings sealed and raw materials virtually nonexistent, Atallah turned to the war itself as his only remaining resource. “Today, we obtain clay from the remnants of the Occupation’s missile strikes and from the craters left by the bombs,” he explained. “We also extract clay manually from underground. With all the crossings into Gaza closed, no raw materials are entering, so this is the only way we can continue working.” 

The products he now shapes are not decorative objects meant for galleries. Instead, they are essential tools of survival that can no longer be imported. “Because of the siege and the destruction, people urgently need basic household items,” Atallah said. “There are no plates, no cooking pots, no water containers. The demand for pottery dishes and utensils is huge because there are simply no alternatives available,” he added.  

He sells some pieces locally, often for the equivalent of just a few dollars.  

“The price of an item is sometimes around two dollars. It is not real income—it is only enough to keep us alive from one day to the next,” he said.  

Yet even that fragile income is a lifeline for a man who, like nearly all Gazans, has lost stability, home, and security. “Before the war, my family and I were already struggling,” he said, “but at least we were living with dignity. Life was not comfortable, but it was much better than what we are living today.” 

Atallah now lives displaced in the central Strip, far from the neighborhood where his family’s craft once thrived. “Everything we built over years is gone,” he said. “The goal now is to find financial support for this workshop. The situation in Gaza is extremely dire. We are not surviving on donations from abroad; people need tools to live, not just food to survive.”   

Not far away, Nada Rajab, a 22-year-old Palestinian artist, writer, and geographic information systems engineer, is also rebuilding from the ruins, but with pencil, fabric, and children’s voices.  

Rajab is the coordinator and head of “Art from the Rubble,” a project operating across displacement areas in Gaza. She has been displaced more than 25 times since the war began.  

“I am a survivor and a witness to everything that is happening in Gaza,” she told The Media Line. “I use my art to document my personal experience and the collective suffering of my community.  

To her, art is not an escape from war; it is a confrontation with it.  

“I see my artwork as a powerful form of resistance and resilience,” Rajab said. “It is my message to the world that says, ‘I am still alive,’ despite the destruction. Through my art, I try to recreate color from beneath the rubble and bring life, emotion, and identity back into a city that has become overwhelmed by grey.” 

Since the war began, she has produced more than 300 artworks documenting forced displacement and struggles amid the conflict.  

Before the war, Rajab owned dozens of professional drawing tools. Today, she works with almost nothing. “For the first time in my life, I completed more than 300 artworks using only plain white paper, a single pencil, and low-quality colored pencils,” she said. “Even finding these basic materials was extremely difficult because of the shortages and soaring prices.” 

When supplies vanished completely, she improvised.  

“I replaced canvas with fabric salvaged from beneath the rubble and substituted acrylics with natural pigments I made myself,” she said. “I did everything I could to keep creating art, no matter how difficult it became.”  

While Rajab documents war through her own work, some of her most powerful creations now come through children, many of whom have never processed their trauma in words.  

“The hardest part was that I could understand every drawing made by each child,” she said. “It was extremely painful to recognize that all of my students were suffering from severe psychological trauma without realizing it themselves.” 

With no safe space available, she takes art directly into displacement camps. “I had no fixed place where I could teach,” she said. “I became the one who went to the children, gathering them around their tents. At the beginning, ensuring their safety was very difficult, but over time I built a strong bond with them, as if they had become my own.”  

Her sessions often last all day. “Most of our activities start at sunrise and end by sunset,” she said. “At the end of the day, every child returns to their tent full of joy.”   

Building trust takes time. “It took more than two weeks before they began pouring their emotions onto paper,” Rajab recalled. “At first, many drew chaotic lines that reflected their lack of self-confidence. Some could only draw flowers because they didn’t know how to express what they felt inside.” 

One moment changed everything. “A mother once called me to say her son, Abdullah, had become calm and focused and now spends most of his time drawing and studying,” she said.   

Rajab explained that Abdullah dropped out of education after his school was bombed. Before art, he played in the streets all day. After art, he became peaceful and creative she said.  

From that point on, she began following up with families.  

“Every single family noticed a clear, positive change in their children’s behavior,” she said. “That impact means the world to me.” 

Rajab still follows many students online even after new displacements forced her to move again.  

There are moments that stay with her in haunting clarity. “After one activity, a boy and a girl held my hands and begged me, ‘Please come back again.”The boy told her that he wished that she had been with them from the beginning.   

She also remembers a terminally ill child. “A little girl battling cancer once told me, ‘When I start making art with you, I forget that I’m sick,’” she said.  

Each farewell brought a new wound. Leaving each group of children was always difficult, whether it was because of bombings, displacement, or the collapse of a tent.  

Though working in different mediums, Atallah and Rajab are engaged in the same quiet battle to preserve humanity where destruction dominates. His hands shape clay into vessels that carry water and food. Her hands guide children while they shape trauma into color.  

“People don’t just need food,” Atallah stressed, “they need to live.”  

“Art allows the children to breathe again,” Rajab emphasized.  

Today, both of them continue to work without any certainty about tomorrow. Neither knows when the next displacement may come, when another workshop may be lost, or when another tent may collapse. Yet both persist—not in defiance of fear, but through it.  

Their work is not only what they create. It is what they refuse to surrender.

Jafar Atallah. (Courtesy: Jafar Atallah)