Moustafa Haidar’s Qana Massacre, 1996, depicts the harrowing scene of the massacre that took place in the village of Qana in Southern Lebanon in 1996. The artist renders a mass of human figures, men, women, and children, in states of terror, agony, and violent death underneath a bombed and jagged roof structure with a torn out United Nations flag still attached to it. The human bodies, drenched in blood, marked with wounds, or torn apart into pieces are sprawled across the foreground of the painting, and in some instances hanging in dismembered bloody tatters from the destroyed building. The painting’s palette is dominated by blood-red and earthy brown, emphasizing the violence and gore, while simultaneously contrasting sharply with the fragments of green landscape and village homes in the background.
The Qana Massacre took place on April 18, 1996, in the village of Qana in Southern Lebanon, a region that had been under Israeli occupation since 1978. After Israel launched its 1996 military campaign Operation Grapes of Wrath, its forces carried out what became known as the first, or greater, Qana Massacre (it would be followed by another during the 2006 July War).
Shortly after 2:00 pm on April 18, 1996, Israeli artillery struck a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) compound without issuing any prior warning to UN forces in Lebanon or taking steps to avoid civilian harm. A total of thirteen high-explosive shells landed on the compound, killing 106 civilians, many of them women and children, and injuring over 100 others. Those were civilians who had fled their homes seeking shelter in a presumably safe place.
The artist first heard about the massacre while he was in Tyre, Lebanon, when cars drove through the streets announcing what had transpired, and urging people to go there to help remove survivors. When he arrived at the scene, aiming to offer help, Haidar was confronted by what he referred to as “a sea of blood and corpses.” One such scene was that of a child’s severed arm and leg hanging on the branches of a nearby tree, which we see in Haidar’s painting featured as a child’s dismembered body caught in a tree branch at the top right of the Qana Massacre frame.
A few days after witnessing the horrors of the massacre, Haidar set up a sheet of fabric on site facing the ruins and began painting what he had seen. The artist set the sheet on the ground, which was scattered with tiny pieces of gravel and rubble. He folded and unfolded the sheet while proceeding to paint one section after the other. He was constantly aware of the Israeli helicopters hovering over his head and around the area, yet he persisted. Over the course of three days, Haidar remained in place, sleeping on the spot when it grew too dark to see, until the piece was completed.
The impromptu process and its setting had a significant impact on the work. The translucent red, which is heavily used to depict the blood and gore in the painting, was not a purely aesthetic choice; rather, it was an unintended consequence of the artist's limited paint supply, a result of the work's unplanned production. The improvised nature of the piece also left traces of the tiny pieces of gravel, visible as small dots across the blood-red sections of the painting. This often leads viewers to mistake it for a unique technique of interrupted brushstrokes.
Qana Massacre, 1996, quickly became a coveted work among cultural institutions in the Arab world. Museums, foundations, and ministries were prepared to pay some of the highest sums ever offered for a work by an Arab artist. However, Haidar insisted it remain in Lebanon, and today it is part of the permanent collection of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.
signed and dated in English and Arabic front lower left
