The barefoot boy with his back to the world is the best-known symbol of Palestine. He was drawn by the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who was killed for his work. Scroll to meet him.
Handala is ten years old. That was Naji al-Ali's age when his family was driven out of Palestine in 1948. Naji said Handala would stay ten until he could return home, and only then would he begin to grow up.
His hair stands up like the thorns of a hedgehog. His name comes from the handal, a bitter plant native to Palestine whose roots run deep and which grows back when it is cut down.
In the early cartoons Handala faced the reader. After the 1973 war, Naji turned him around, hands clasped behind his back: a refusal of the deals being made over Palestinians' heads, and of a world that watched and did nothing.
He wears the worn, mended clothes of the children in the refugee camps, where Naji grew up.
He is barefoot, like the poor children of the camps. He owns nothing, and he has nowhere to go but home.
We have never seen his face. He stands at the edge of every one of Naji's cartoons, watching. He will turn around when Palestine is free.
The cartoonist who gave Palestine its most famous child, and was killed for his drawings.
Naji al-Ali is born in al-Shajara, a Palestinian village in the Galilee between Tiberias and Nazareth.
Zionist forces take al-Shajara. Naji's family flees to Ain al-Hilweh, a refugee camp in south Lebanon, and the village is destroyed. He is about ten years old, the age Handala will always be.
Naji draws in the camp, often on its walls, and is arrested many times. The Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani sees his drawings and publishes one in the magazine al-Hurriya.
Working for newspapers in Kuwait, Naji creates the barefoot boy who will sign every cartoon he draws from then on.
Handala turns away from the reader, hands clasped behind him, and never turns around again.
Naji draws for newspapers in Kuwait, Beirut and London, an estimated 40,000 cartoons. He spares no one: the Israeli occupation, Arab governments that abandoned Palestinians, and Palestinian leaders he believed had lost their way.
Naji is shot outside the London office of the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas. He dies on 29 August, after five weeks in a coma. He is buried in Brookwood Cemetery outside London, far from Palestine.
The World Association of Newspapers awards him, after his death, its Golden Pen of Freedom.
London's Metropolitan Police reopen the investigation into his killing. No one has ever been brought to justice.
Handala is painted on the separation wall, carried on protest signs, worn as a necklace and tattooed on skin. He belongs to every Palestinian who has not been allowed to go home. We named this site after him because he is a witness. He does not look away, and neither should we.
