About

How and why was the mobile funeral created? You read it here. Including sources.

Background

According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza on the 26th of October, the number of victims from the Israeli war on Gaza has risen to 7028 martyrs, including 2913 children and 4115 adults. This number is rising as we write this text because of the ongoing Israeli siege on people in Gaza, depriving them of electricity, vital to the work of hospital and rescue teams, and water, food, and humanitarian aid. Families have been wiped off the civil registry in Gaza in hours, with Israel targeting homes, hospitals, markets, and schools.   

In the face of such atrocities and genocide, we often remember statistics and numbers, but behind every number lies a human being with dreams, hopes, and stories. In a heart-breaking speech of Ramsey Naser at BNNVARA television he asked the Dutch audience: Do we know the name of every Palestinian victim?.

Dr Moueen Al Borsch from Gaza reached out to us with the idea of creating a funeral to honor the lives of those killed, because they are not only numbers. They have names, they had dreams… 

Dr Moueen Al Borsch is a professor at the University of Palestine and used to live in Gaza with his four children. After losing his home two times and losing one son, he came to the Netherlands for treatment of his children, amongst others for the injuries caused by white phosphorus. He knows how important it is to remember the people who are lost in the violence. 

The process of getting the banners created 

We decided to make this happen. Step one was deciding on the form. We decided to make it a mobile funeral to be able to use it at as many different locations and events as possible. We left the original idea of standing plates and switched to landscape foldable / rollable banners: easy to transport, easy to show in different ways, waterproof and strong. In the meantime a design team worked on a design, and we created a crowdunding campaing. 

The next step was to gather ‘content’. How terrible to speak about content when it comes to killed human lives. The fact was, often we had to switch off our minds and feelings while working on this project, or we would not be able to continue. 

We use two types of content for the banners: 

  1. Names
  2. Stories and pictures 

Names: 

Initially we started searching for names on the internet. However, on October 26th the ministry of Health in Gaza issued a report containing a list of 6747 names of people killed from the 7th of October till the 26th of October, including 2665 children. The list presented the names, age, gender and official ID of the people. This list was from now on used for the banners. Note: there is one duplicate in the list (ID number 426457511). 

We gathered a team to translate the Arabic names to English. While halfway, a Malaysian team released a translation that we adopted. However, in a later stage we realised that many names had not been translated in the way that suited the Palestinians in our team. Note that Arabic names can be translated in many different ways. It meant a lot of extra work and a delay in getting the banners, but in the end we felt is of utmost importance to display the names in a way that honours the Palestinians killed. So we reworked and edited the list.  

While designing the banner it also became apparent that the way the names were presented with first names, father’s names, grandfather’s names and family names was not suitable for the banners. So we shortened the names to include only first name, father’s name and family name.  

The final list of names of victims between October 7 and October 26 is available on this website, containing ID number, three names in English, age and gender.

Stories and pictures 

A research team gathered information online. Initially raw content was gathered. After that the content was verified – were the individuals killed in the attacks of October 2023? What is the source? Much more content was gathered than we will display on the banners. Idea is to present that all on the website by time. The stories were edited and proofread by English native speakers. 

The final steps were adding the content to the design and printing. 

Important note: 

We know that not only in Gaza people are killed, also in the West Bank there are violent raids and at the moment of writing far over the 100 people have been killed. When we talk of Palestine, we think of whole Palestine. However, for the time being, we used the source of information from the ministry in Gaza representing the victims in Gaza only. 

The banners first in use 

On November 3rd the first banners became physically available. On the same day they were used in Dublin, Rotterdam and Amsterdam and many requests came in for the use of the banners. Also an Instagram account was created. You will be able to find more information in the ‘Where it was’ section of the website. We hope many more people will be able to use them to commemorate the people killed and to call for justice and a free Palestine! If you like to know how, refer to ‘How to use‘.

What is next 

So hopefully many people will use the banners. We know – unfortunately – that these nearly 7000 victims are not the last ones. We have at the moment not yet decided how to continue with the project for the banners. We will, however, continue to add names, photos and stories to our website. 

Updates end of 2023

While the end of 2023 is approaching and we are all counting down to ceasefire, we know there will be many more hardships. It is more important than ever to keep pointing out we are talking about human lives that are destroyed. The lives of mainly children, including very young babies. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends, funny, serious, intelligent, sportive, artistic…. any kind of people.

Not only the bombing causes so many deaths. Also the destruction of hospitals, destroying of places where people sought shelter, the refusal of aid (food, clean water, medicins, cloths…) and the winter that entered also Gaza. 

In the past months several new projects were taken up:

Postcards

Two series of postcards were created: the Christmas postcards were spread at events, hung in Christmas trees, used in card-writingsessions. The new series is calles ‘What about their dreams’ and pictures images made by Motaz Azaiza. They will also be spread in The Netherlands but can also be downloaded from the website.

Posters

Several people requested posters. The first one is read. More to follow soon.

Special Banners

Serveral special banners are in progress of being created. The first one about killed jounalists.

No new list of names

There is no new list of names released. For more information, read here.

Aims

We wrote our aims down as follows:

They Have Names, They Had Dreams is an initiative, not an oranisation. We seek to voice the message of Palestinians by:
– Honouring the lives of the victims and give a way to mourne
– Letting the Palestinians know that they are not forgotten 
– Using this very basic idea of bringing humanity in stead of numbers to people who would usually not be impacted and to take this as an opportunity to educate.