The purpose of the exhibit is to amplify the voices of children who survived the October 7th massacre in Israel.
The Hallandale Beach Cultural Center is displaying dozens of paintings done by children in the town of Sderot, which is very close to Gaza. These are kids ages seven through nine, kids who saw Hamas commit atrocities.
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The paintings were done as part of a group therapy program to encourage the children to express thoughts that are hard to verbalize.
The images are both harrowing and hopeful. Some kids drew rainbows and smiley faces, but most of the paintings depict violence that no child should ever see.
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“The children are telling us what Black Saturday for them was, if you notice some of the paintings, these are children that emigrated from Ukraine so they were traumatized first time around, only to emigrate to Israel and now to go through what we call Black Saturday or Black Sabbath,” said Anabelle Lima-Taub, the vice mayor of Hallandale Beach and the organizer of the exhibit. “I see tremendous trauma and tremendous pain, for children to draw paintings with blood and bullets and missiles and asking for help in Hebrew and English and in Russian, I think there’s tremendous trauma and I don’t know how many years that will take to undo.”
The Hamas barbarity on October 7th, in which more than 1,200 mostly unarmed civilians were slaughtered, led directly to the war in Gaza. Captain Elkana Cohen, an IDF reservist, was immediately called back to active duty.
“And believe me, I rather to have a boring life but unfortunately, those people force us to fight for our people,” Cohen said Monday in South Florida.
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Cohen kept a journal during his months in combat, and it turned into a book published by Simon and Schuster and released on October 7th.
It’s called, "October 7th, the War Against Hamas Through the Eyes of an Israeli Commando Officer."
Cohen’s book is a first-person account of the horrors of the Gaza war, from finding entrances to terror tunnels hidden in childrens’ rooms to discovering caches of guns, ammunition and RPG’s inside homes, even one house which was booby trapped with explosives to kill IDF soldiers.
He tells the story of the time his unit tried to get civilians to evacuate from a school compound which they suspected was being used by Hamas as a command center.
None of the civilians were leaving, so they used a drone to get a closer look.
“One of the Hamas guards took his AK47 and shot, I think it was five years old, shot this little kid in his head and killed him in front of his mom, so that time we understood we have to kill these guards not only for our sake but for those civilians’ sake,” Cohen said, explaining that Hamas needed the civilians to be too scared to leave so that they would stay, knowing their presence would deter an Israeli attack. “I’m sharing that because I want people to understand what we are actually dealing with through this war.”
Through their artwork, we can see what the kids are dealing with. They are suffering in Gaza as well from the war launched by Hamas. As Cohen said, this war would end if Hamas would just release the hostages.
