Iconic Palestinian artist Fathi Ghaben died on Sunday in Gaza, at the age of 77, after Israeli authorities prevented him from leaving the besieged Strip to receive treatment abroad, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture announced.
“Ghaben’s departure constitutes a loss to Palestinian art,” the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry explained that “Ghaben, who was suffering from severe chest and lung problems, needed to travel abroad to complete his treatment, due to the lack of medicines and oxygen in Gaza, but the occupation authorities did not allow him to leave the Strip.”
Fathi Ghaben was born in the village of Harbia in the northern Gaza Strip in 1947. His mother carried him during the Nakba and was forcibly displaced to Gaza, where he lived his life in the Jabaliya camp.
Ghaben, who also worked as an advisor in the Ministry of Culture, won many international awards during his artistic career.
“Palestine was always present in all its details in Ghaben’s works,” Palestinian Minister of Culture Atef Abu Seif said, adding: “He immortalized the life of the Palestinian village that the Nakba wanted to erase, remembering the village of Harbia, in which he was born.”
The cultural scene in the Gaza Strip lost many creative people in various fields due to the ongoing Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, while dozens of cultural centers, museums and libraries were destroyed.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 29,692 Palestinians have been killed, and 69,879 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
Moreover, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.