Activists unfurl banner at Madrid Museum to demand Gaza ceasefire

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, Reuters reports.

In Wednesday’s action, global campaigning group, Greenpeace, and the, “Unmute Gaza Movement” that supports photojournalists reporting from the war zone used a banner with an illustration by US 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 fire-fighters watched on, without intervening.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October in response to an attack by the Hamas group that runs the enclave, which killed 1,200 people and captured around 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health authorities, that has turned much of the enclave to a wasteland.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

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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