Cartoon by Safaa Odah
This piece had been left in my draft folder since the end of the summer, and I’m bringing it back today because, given the dire situation that continues to prevail in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s still good news.
In mid-July 2024, the organisation Cartooning for Peace published a plea for help from Safaa Odah, a Palestinian cartoonist who had been displaced several times by the war alongside her sister, and who was living in a tent “in a place unfit for human habitation” after her home in Rafah had been destroyed. She denounced the climate of total insecurity in which she was living, under constant bombardment. Even so, she managed to survive for almost two years in the Khan Younis camp.
Finally, on 28 August, Safaa, who was awarded the Collège de France’s PAUSE Prize in the spring of 2025 and won the 2026 Kofi Annan Prize for Courage in Cartooning, awarded by Freedom Cartoonists, was able to leave Gaza and arrived in France thanks to a collective effort involving various institutions, organisations and prominent figures committed to making this evacuation from the Gaza Strip possible.
Safaa Odah has thus begun her artist-in-residence programme in Angoulême, organised by the Cité de la bande dessinée et de l’image and the École européenne supérieure de l’image (ÉESI).
PAUSE is the national emergency hosting programme for scientists and artists in exile, launched by the Collège de France with the support of various ministries and numerous partners from the fields of higher education and research, culture and civil society.
In April 2025, the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, in collaboration with the renowned Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh, published Safaa’s diary, illustrated with her own drawings, entitled “Safaa and the Tent”. This work, which won an award in the UK, has been published in India, Italy, Greece, the Philippines and the United States.
