> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.merip.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Gazing into Gaza with Mahmoud Alhaj - URL: https://www.merip.org/2026/08/gazing-into-gaza-with-mahmoud-alhaj/ - Published: 2026-08-20T12:54:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-20T14:24:52.000Z - Description: A visual essay featuring Alhaj’s 2024 exhibition 'Control Anatomy.’ - Author: Rana Anani - Tags: Palestine, Gaza, Art, Occupation, #Up Front, issue 319 *In June 2024, Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah presented* Control Anatomy*, the first solo exhibition of Palestinian artist Mahmoud Alhaj. Organized as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza continued and as military raids and restrictions intensified across the West Bank, the exhibition brought together digital works that explore how surveillance technologies have shaped Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.* *Since October 2023, artists in Gaza have* [*lost their lives*](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/13/a-painter-a-poet-a-novelist-the-artists-being-killed-in-gaza)*, or their life’s works, amid the* [*Israeli destruction*](https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/) *of cultural institutions, archives, museums, universities and artists’ studios alongside homes and other civilian infrastructure. Among the losses were Eltiqa and* [*Shababeek for Contemporary Art*](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/arts-center-in-gaza-destroyed-180984142/)*, both located near Al-Shifa Hospital and destroyed during Israel’s March 2024 assault on the hospital complex. Shababeek housed more than 15,000 artworks and had served for 15 years as one of Gaza's principal spaces for contemporary artists.* *Alhaj’s digital artworks survived because his laptop did. Alhaj—who was born in Gaza in 1990 to a family displaced from the village of Bashshit during the Nakba and raised in Khan Younis—has, from the start of his career, consciously chosen to practice digital art. His decision stemmed from the realities of producing art under siege, where the movement of physical artworks into and out of Gaza is constrained by Israeli border restrictions. His artistic practice centers around memory and the architectures of violence, drawing on photography, collage, video, digital archives and online maps.* > Alhaj’s digital artworks survived because his laptop did. *During the first eight months of the genocide, he remained in Khan Younis. In the spring of 2024, he managed to leave Gaza for Egypt, ahead of his wife and child. When Israel invaded Rafah in May of 2024, the border closed and the family was separated for months. As these events unfolded,* Control Anatomy *was being prepared for exhibition in Ramallah. Unable to travel, Alhaj oversaw the exhibition remotely from Cairo, guiding every stage of the printing and installation through calls, emails and shared digital files.* *In the following visual essay, curator Rana Anani explains how Alhaj’s work connects personal memory to broader systems of surveillance, spatial control and erasure, illustrating how the technologies shaping everyday life in Gaza are also integral to the longer history of Israeli settler colonialism and the violence continuing today.* ## ControlAnatomy The first time I engaged Alhaj’s work was when he participated in the Spring Exhibition at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah in June 2023, which I curated. I was fascinated by the aesthetics and proficiency on display, the delicate and subtle manipulation of images on the canvas. His work portrayed Gaza from an unusual perspective, one that did not enforce victimhood but drew attention to the agency of Palestinians under occupation. I was captivated by his attempts to look at Gaza from the perspective of the Israeli military. From that first interaction with his work, I knew I wanted to stage a solo exhibition by him in Ramallah. As a curator, I decided during the genocide to focus my exhibition program on artists from Gaza. It felt like the least I could do under these circumstances. Yet, like many artists from Gaza I have worked with over the past 15 years, Alhaj and I had never met in person. Israel's restrictions mean that artists in Gaza cannot come to Ramallah, and Palestinians from the West Bank cannot travel to Gaza. Our collaboration, like so many others, existed entirely through technology. We spoke by phone and video call, exchanged emails and digital files and worked together across enforced separation. When the exhibition opened, I called him from the gallery so he could experience the opening remotely from Cairo. ## The Guards of Roses ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.11.jpg) **Control Anatomy,* Study No. 11, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketch. In the work titled *Control Anatomy*, which we also used as the title of the exhibit, Alhaj uses images found on the internet along with his own sketches and handwritten notes to tell the story of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in Gaza. As a child, Alhaj moved with his family to a house 15 minutes away from Khan Younis refugee camp. There, he witnessed the persistent expansion of the Israeli settlement Ganei Tal until it reached his doorstep. Ganei Tal, which translates from Hebrew to “Gardens of Dew,” belonged to the larger Gush Katif bloc that included 21 settlements and over 3,000 greenhouses, famous for growing roses and carnations for export to Europe. These settlements, home to around 8,000 settlers, were deliberately designed to split the Gaza Strip into three separate areas, blocking Palestinians from moving freely. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.10.jpg) **Control Anatomy,* Study No. 10, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketch. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.7.jpg) **Control Anatomy,* Study No. 7, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketch. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.9.jpg) **Control Anatomy,* Study No. 9, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketch. Alhaj grew up aware of this expanding military structure imposed on his neighborhood. It implanted in him a fear of open spaces and a constant sense of being under surveillance and threat. He recalls how “the guards of the roses” positioned in the watchtowers instantly killed a Palestinian man who lost his way near the settlement. They claimed that he was hiding a suicide belt underneath his clothes. > It implanted in him a fear of open spaces and a constant sense of being under surveillance and threat. This event was engraved in Alhaj’s memory, leaving him with haunting questions: “How could the military guards tell from 700 meters away that the man was wearing a suicide belt? Why did they kill him when he posed no threat to this invincible fortress?” Yet even more persistent questions plagued him: “How did the guards see him, his family and his home across the road? Would he one day suffer the same fate as that unlucky man?” [\[1\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fedn1) In this series, Alhaj explores the colonial gaze by presenting the Israeli military personnel in an abstract, almost invisible way—devoid of human faces—as it is experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. At the same time, he traces connections between the present machinery of war and its very visible effects: the human toll of death, displacement and daily control. Indeed, he describes his childhood as a “pilot for what is happening today; a pilot for the efficiency of tools of violence intended to become, in the future, a systematic and deliberate act of erasure.” ## Surveillance ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Unnatural-Landscape-3-1.jpg) **Unnatural Landscape 3*, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, surveillance drone footage frames and archival material. In his series *Unnatural Landscape*, Alhaj tackles surveillance through imaginative maps of Gaza City with traces of drones in the skies and between the high-rise buildings. Alhaj witnessed the Israeli withdrawal from the settlements in Gaza in 2005 as part of what Israel called the “disengagement” plan. Shortly after, he realized that the surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza had not stopped; instead, it had taken on a different shape. Drones became a familiar feature in Gaza’s skies. Human rights organizations have criticized Israel’s extensive use of surveillance drones in Gaza and the disruptive effects of their visible and audible presence in the lives of 2 million Palestinians, producing a constant state of fear and anxiety. Drones have also been used to carry out extrajudicial killings of Palestinians. Between 2000 and 2022, Israel killed around 2,146 Palestinians (349 inside their homes), including 378 children, [with weaponized drones](https://www.mezan.org/public/en/post/33747). > Shortly after, he realized that the surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza had not stopped; instead, it had taken on a different shape. In *Unnatural Landscape*, Alhaj layers archival photographs as an exercise in imagining how much information these drones have been able to store from their daily missions. He wonders if there are servers big enough to store all this data.[\[2\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fedn2) The answer to this question is yes: Following the 2021 Project Nimbus deal, Amazon and Google provided Israeli military and intelligence units with the necessary infrastructure for storing massive amounts of surveillance data from both Gaza and the West Bank. The information stored on these cloud-based servers has fed the AI tools used by Israel to generate targets in what has been called the world’s “[first AI-assisted genocide](https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656285)." ## Erasure ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Roofs-Knocking-2.jpg) **Roofs Knocking,* No. 2, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, frames from drone footage and archival images. During the First Intifada in 1987, Palestinians threw stones at the Israeli military and hid in the narrow alleys of refugee camps, out of the army’s reach. In response, Israel dropped stones from helicopters onto the camps’ asbestos roofs, causing deafening roars and injuries. Alhaj depicts these events in his series *Roofs Knocking*. Like his other works from 2022, it is dominated by black and gray and incorporates digital photography and drone imagery. The series tackles the escalating methods of Israeli war-making against Palestinians by exploring what the Israeli army calls “roof knocking,” the warnings sometimes given before striking civilian homes. In his work, Alhaj imagines the view from the binoculars of an Israeli pilot (No. 2), who can only see the asbestos roofs of the impoverished refugee camp. From this bird’s eye view, the cramped and densely populated camp appears devoid of life—an easy, video game-like target for sophisticated missiles. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Roofs-Knocking-1.jpg) **Roofs Knocking,* No. 1, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, frames from drone footage and archival images. *Roofs Knocking* No. 1 shows the refugee camp from a Palestinian on-the-ground perspective, where simple houses exist for regular people. Here, innocent lives are lost as residents are unable to flee during the short window of time given by an Israeli warning missile. Alhaj avoids using human figures in his art, refusing to be seen as a victim, and instead focuses on maps, buildings and architecture. In *Shooting Range 365*, also from 2022, homes appear compressed in vertical concrete blocks against an arid landscape, the sea in the background, like a scene from science fiction. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Shooting-Range-365-No.1-1.jpg) **Shooting Range 365*, No. 1, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, 3-D models and archival materials. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Shooting-Range-365-No.4.jpg) **Shooting Range 365*, No. 4, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, 3-D models and archival materials. His imaginative rendering of Gaza reflects the political reality. Israel has long restricted Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank from horizontal expansion, forcing vertical growth that squeezes Palestinians into small spaces while reserving land for Israeli settlements. Looking at this series in light of recent events also evokes US President Donald Trump’s 2025 so-called peace plan that would confine Gazans to restricted hinterlands and turn the seafront into resorts for the wealthy. > Alhaj avoids using human figures in his art, refusing to be seen as a victim, and instead focuses on maps, buildings and architecture. ## Confinement The grey color of Israeli walls and military structures designed for siege has long preoccupied Alhaj. In his series*Fifth Dimension*(2020), he links the 503-mile-long West Bank apartheid wall that splits towns and disrupts ecosystems to parallel systems besieging Gaza. In 2003, Israel cut off dozens of communities in the West Bank from their surroundings, including Qalqilya in the north and the Shu’fat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, seized their lands and confined their people, creating a concrete labyrinth with no escape. Alhaj depicts the wall of the West Bank surrounding city blocks, showing how it isolates Palestinian neighborhoods like prison cells. He draws a powerful parallel between the two separated halves of the homeland—Gaza and the West Bank—exposing siege as an instrument of occupation and control in both areas. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Fifth-Dimension-1-1.jpg) **Fifth Dimension*, No. 1, 2020, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, Google Maps and internet archives. In *Fifth Dimension*, No. 1, Alhaj uses the technique of collage to depict Palestinian West Bank neighborhoods—seen from above in drone images—as hemmed in by the separation wall. This series, as a whole, communicates the same feeling of suffocation that Alhaj experienced growing up, unable to leave Gaza. When Israel imposed its siege in 2006, he was 16 and longed to see the world, but this was not possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Fifth-Dimension-3-2.jpg) **Fifth Dimension*, No. 3, 2020, Mahmoud Alhaj, digital photography, Google Maps and internet archives. Over the past two decades, this strangulation of Gaza has only grown more absolute, while the occupation has also become more entrenched in the West Bank, with major sections of the wall separating communities and families from each other and farmers from their lands. > This series, as a whole, communicates the same feeling of suffocation that Alhaj experienced growing up, unable to leave Gaza. ## Memory ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.6-1.jpg) **Control Anatomy*, No. 6, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketches. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/45/9b45c1a1-9179-4ea6-9cac-2e14c9ea334d/content/images/2026/08/Control-Anatomy-No.5-1.jpg) **Control Anatomy*, No. 5, 2022, Mahmoud Alhaj, digitized sketches. Israel has [long controlled](https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/202338) visual access in Palestine, from early cartography that helped erase 500 villages during the Nakba, to modern drones, satellite images and digital maps. Through multiple generations of technology, the goal has remained the same: to maintain dominance over space, while at the same time stripping the colonized of the right to look by building a massive wall that blocks the view, preventing the use of the skies by drones or airplanes and restricting access to sites on the internet. Alhaj turned to digital archives and Google Maps to construct his own narrative but found little information available to him as a Palestinian. For example, when five children in his neighborhood were killed by an Israeli landmine during the second Intifada, the incident vanished from record along with the children’s bodies. Footage from television reports that captured the incident disappeared when Israel bombed Al-Jalaa Tower in 2021, which housed press offices, footage and archives. In 1997, the United States enacted a law restricting detailed maps of occupied Palestine, by placing limits on satellite imagery resolution, to address Israeli security concerns. Although the law was repealed under the Trump presidency, Israel's ties with Google, Apple and Microsoft prevented these companies from [updating](https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-maps-gaza-israel/) images of Gaza for some time. > Alhaj turned to digital archives and Google Maps to construct his own narrative but found little information available to him as a Palestinian. In his film *The Right to See*,Alhaj confronts these erasures, illustrating the limitations he faces even through Google Earth: “I am practicing my right to see, even though these maps have nothing to do with the reality where I live, neither their components nor their colors resemble our reality \[since they are\] devoid of details. I cannot see what I see over Washington, Madrid, Paris. I see what the general allowed me to see, 25 times less details…I don’t see walls on maps...despite their enormous mass and distortion of their surroundings.”[\[3\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fedn3) Instead, Alhaj looked for archives of Israeli military activity in Gaza during the Second Intifada. He started to collect images and stories from people in Gaza but found the process futile. He decided to take a different approach and turned to Israeli sources by searching for Gush Katif in Hebrew online. Eventually the results started appearing from settlers who lived in Gaza before 2006 and were publishing their memories from that time. Through this practice he fell into the archive of the other side and began to forge his own work based on this collection. He also found some photographs taken by soldiers on the internet, which he eventually used in this body of work. Throughout the exhibition, Alhaj not only presented his collected material, he constructed an alternative archive, using the very tools that have been implicated in oppression to build instead a counter-archive that reclaims memory and visibility. By turning the colonizer’s gaze back upon itself, Alhaj exposes the biases of the available archives and reclaims the narrative of life in Gaza on his own terms. \[**Rana Anani** is an independent writer and curator.\] SUPPORT MERIP All of MERIP's analysis is provided without paywalls! Make a donation now to help us keep it that way. [DONATE NOW! ](https://www.merip.org/donate/) --- ## Endnotes [\[1\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fednref1) Mahmoud Alhaj, Zoom interview by Rana Anani, June 20, 2024\. [\[2\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fednref2) Mahmoud Alhaj, *Control Anatomy*, 2021, video, 17 min. [\[3\]](applewebdata://5ACAA1B6-D0B5-4307-B4FF-8CC43469BB25#%5Fednref3) Mahmoud Alhaj, *The Right to See*, 2021, video work, 6.42 min.