“Drawing is my way to resist the occupation. To prove we exist.”
In this powerful seventh episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the story of 25-year-old Noura AlQasasiya, an artist from Gaza whose brushstrokes capture both the anguish of a besieged people and their refusal to be forgotten.
Raised in the knowledge of her ancestral village Zarnouka, dispossessed since 1948, Noura’s personal and national history are inseparable.
“We learned about the occupation from our parents,” she says, “but we lived it ourselves.” Her dreams of studying fashion abroad were slowly crushed by blockade and siege. “My life,” she says, “is like a swing in a cage.”
After October 7, that cage collapsed. Noura’s home was destroyed. She was displaced multiple times. The trauma of bombings, tents, and death became a constant.
“We don’t live a normal life. Not physically. Not psychologically. Everything collapsed.”
“What scares me more than death is having to live in a world where everyone watched and said nothing.”
With electricity gone and food scarce, Noura clung to what little she could carry—her sketchbook, her iPad, and her colours. She began documenting everything: the bombings, the grief, the faces of her people. Her art became her archive. Her witness. Her resistance.
Studio guest Tareq Othman, a British-Palestinian activist, reflects on the broader role of the diaspora.
“Seeing people like Noura continue to create in the face of so much loss,” he says, “reminds us that Palestinians aren’t just surviving—they’re living, they’re resisting, they’re refusing to be erased.”
The episode also tackles the world’s indifference. Noura’s bitterness is palpable.
“How can people go on with their lives, with their gossip and comforts, while we are being slaughtered?” she asks.
And yet, she doesn’t retreat into silence. She keeps drawing. She keeps hoping.
“My message to the world: don’t stop speaking about us. Share our stories. Because they want to silence every Palestinian voice.”
In Noura’s hands, art is more than beauty—it is memory, protest, and defiance. And as long as her pencil moves, the world cannot say it did not know.
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