Watch: Italian art installation honours 20,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza

A video showing an art installation in Brescia, northern Italy, has gone viral on social media, capturing thousands of white fabric strips bearing the handwritten names and ages of 20,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza Strip.

The memorial forms part of “Un nome un bambino, un nome una bambina” — “A name for every boy, a name for every girl” — an exhibition hosted in the courtyard of the Mo.Ca cultural centre in Via Moretto and supported by the Municipality of Brescia.

Watch the video here

The installation was created by parents, teachers, children and early-years educators from 39 nurseries and pre-schools across the city and province. After weeks of preparation, the courtyard was filled with rows of white ribbons carrying the names and ages handwritten on cloth strips, intended to give visible form to the scale of the loss and create a collective gesture of remembrance.

Organisers said the work challenges efforts to reduce the killings to statistics, noting that each strip represents a child whose life was taken by Israeli forces. They described the exhibition as a community-led act of memory and peace, emphasising that every name reflects a life cut short and a future denied.

The video’s rapid spread has drawn visitors to the Mo.Ca courtyard and intensified discussion about the human impact of Israel’s war on Gaza, as images of the densely hung white strips continue to circulate widely across social media platforms.

This is not the first such initiative: in June 2025, at least 18,000 pairs of children’s shoes were placed in Stadhuisplein in Almere, and in March 2024, 14,000 pairs were arranged in Utrecht’s Vredenburg Square to honour Palestinian children killed in the war.

Since the conflict began in October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed nearly 70,000 people in the enclave — mostly women and children — and injured more than 171,000 others, in a campaign that has left much of Gaza in ruins.