In that land where the sky rains fire and the future is obscured by smoke and rubble, Dorgham Qreaiqea planted seeds of hope. 

Born in 1997, Dorgham was a Palestinian artist known and beloved by many in Gaza. Through theater, cinema, painting, and song, he brought smiles to the faces of displaced Palestinians — especially children — throughout the genocide. But Dorgham was not just a painter, filmmaker, or theater director: with his humble presence and tender voice, he gave kids whose childhood had been stolen by war the chance to dream again, and the hope that they would one day come to life. 

Dorgham was a vital part of the Banafsaj project at the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a nonprofit founded in 1989 to expand Palestinian children’s access to books, theater, and other cultural education. Banafsaj (the color purple in Arabic) is a youth-led visual arts team that brings together young people to explore art, painting, photography, design, and sculpture as forms of creative expression and peer learning. 

Dorgham didn’t view art and entertainment as luxuries in wartime, but as urgent and basic necessities to preserve the soul. Even after the Israeli army destroyed his home and studio, he wrote, “Hope is only killed by the death of the soul, and art is my soul — it will not die.”

On March 18, Dorgham, his wife Aya, and 26members of his family were killed in a brutal Israeli assault that targeted his home in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City. But the hope and joy he planted did not die. They still resonate in the Palestinian children who crowded into refugee tents across Gaza, where Dorgham created art projects and staged cultural productions for them — acts of resistance in their own right.

Art against the siege

I contacted Dorgham last year to learn more about his work for my research on children’s culture and life experiences in Gaza. What began as an interview grew into a deep friendship. 

Dorgham had an unwavering belief in art’s power to mend broken and defeated spirits. “The screen is bigger than the war,” he used to tell me, a phrase he once heard from a participant at one of his shows. It wasn’t a poetic metaphor to him; it was a mantra, a plan of action. In cinema, he saw a gateway that transcended the blockade to a world where children could simply be children — if only for an hour.

For an initiative he called “Camp Cinema,” Dorgham turned the nylon walls of tents into projection screens, showing animated films under the open sky. Children gathered barefoot on the sand, their eyes glittering like stars, waiting for the stories to transport them to a world with no walls. They didn’t need popcorn or leather seats; all they needed was Dorgham, his projector, and the stories he brought.

But Dorgham was never content with just relaying other people’s stories. He wrote and directed plays reflecting life in the tents around him — such as “Diaries of the Displaced.” Through a series of comedic sketches and monologues, the play depicted everyday struggles in the displacement camps — from food shortages and overcrowding to the absurdities of adapting to life in a tent — all seen through the eyes of children trying to make sense of a broken world. To Dorgham, these theatrical scenes were collective therapy, a tool for hope and survival.

In the summer of 2024, while warplanes roared overhead, Dorgham filled inflatable pools with water for the children of Khan Younis and Al-Qarara in southern Gaza. They splashed around and shouted with joy, as if the world outside those rubber pools didn’t exist. In August, he unfurled a 30-meter canvas for dozens of children to fill with their paintings and handprints. There were no instructions or limits — just an open invitation to draw.

Dorgham’s work also made space for Gaza’s children to speak about what they had lost. Whether in a drawing of a house that no longer stands, or in a play about waiting in line for water, his art reflected their lives — and invited them to imagine new ones.

In the weeks before his martyrdom, Dorgham continued to plan and host film screenings for displaced children in the camps. The team had no electricity, no stable internet, or funding. Still, they hung banners at camp entrances, carried gas-powered generators, and handed out handwritten tickets to children. These shows were affirmations of life to the children of Gaza: You are here. You matter. You deserve joy.

A wide imagination for a narrow world

I often recall a photo of Dorgham standing under a quote by the great Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi from his autobiographical novel “The Blue Light”: “One must have a wide imagination for a narrow world.”

It’s a photo I share in nearly every lecture I give about the power of children’s literature in Palestine, especially in Gaza. In that photo, Dorgham is standing with his arms outstretched to the sky, carrying within him the sorrows of Gaza’s children and all the hope he never gave up. Dorgham wasn’t a saint — there are none in our time — but he embodied a kind of sacredness rooted in his presence in the camps, his commitment to Gaza’s children, and his steadfast belief in the power of dreams.

From Dorgham, I learned to quiet the voices of despair that so often drift through the atmosphere of our days, and instead to focus on action — on the need to keep children’s hope alive, and to make space for a future even in the middle  of mass destruction. His way of resisting wasn’t loud, but it was steady and deliberate: he chose to build and create when everything else urged surrender.

Dorgham acted with the urgency and generosity of someone who knew time was fragile. When he returned to Gaza City in February after 15 months of displacement and found his home and studio in ruins, he wrote: “Today, everything is being destroyed. My studio — once my refuge for creativity and freedom — is now just rubble beneath the weight of war machines. The Israeli army, which has long abused its power, destroyed all my artworks. Works that expressed history, homeland, the pains and dreams of a people.”

But though Israel took his life and laid waste to his art, Dorgham still remains: in the colored handprints on a tent’s fabric; in the memory of a child who once laughed at one of his plays; in a screen still standing. Dorgham was convinced that neither art nor people die as long as the spirit lives on. And Dorgham’s spirit was an artist’s: stubborn, radiant, and unbreakable.

“If it’s not for us to continue living,” Dorgham wrote at the beginning of 2024, “then preserve our deeds, names, and images. Write on our graves in bold letters: ‘Here lies one who loved life but could not reach it.’”

Dorgham Qreaiqea didn’t just love life. He gave it, generously, to the children of Gaza.

Farewell, Dorgham.