A memorial mural honoring Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel, aged 4, and Kfir, 10 months old, who were abducted and brutally killed by Hamas terrorists while in captivity, was vandalized earlier this month. This incident occurred during a memorial service held for the victims of the attacks on October 7, 2023.
The artwork was created by contemporary pop artist and activist AleXsandro Palombo. He is known for his thought-provoking installations, including a visual depicting the deceased former pontiff, , holding a buoy, with the body of a drowned Syrian toddler, 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who died in 2015 while fleeing the Middle East, lying at his feet.
The Bibas family mural was situated in Milan, outside the Qatari consulate.
“The fact that a mural dedicated to a mother and her two children who were murdered can be defaced without provoking public outrage is the symptom of a sick society and a sign of political and cultural weakness,” Palombo stated to Digital.
“In recent years, segments of the and activist movements have ended up legitimizing extremist pro-Palestinian factions that don’t speak of peace, but of hatred. They don’t defend the rights of Palestinians, they exploit them, effectively promoting the propaganda of Hamas’s violent operatives.”
Shiri’s face on the mural was obscured by an image originally crafted by Vancouver street artist iHeart, which depicts a boy addicted to digital feedback and crying over Instagram likes.
Further modifications were made, including a red bullseye stamped on the boy’s forehead, with the words “No War” displayed beneath the image.
The original Stanley Park artwork gained viral attention in 2014 after catching the eye of the .
Palombo decreed the defacement “not an act of protest, but a serious desecration.”
“This is not a dialogue between works of art, but a deliberate act of erasure,” he asserted. “That face was not chosen to add meaning, but to obscure it. It is an attempt to replace a specific, painful and documented memory with a generic, emotional image that mocks and lends itself easily to manipulation. It is a way of stripping suffering of its significance, turning it into an ideological mask.”
The identity of the person who defaced the mural remains unknown. However, Palombo noted that Islamic fundamentalism is gaining followers, even in Milan, a city he believes should symbolize “openness, democracy and civic awareness.”
Palombo also contends that antisemitism was a factor in the defacement.
“The message is not ambiguous, it’s an disguised as activism, exploiting aesthetics to channel a form of cultural radicalization,” Palombo informed Digital.
“It’s not about expressing an opinion, it’s about undermining memory, attacking its public space, normalizing hatred through visual gestures. Antisemitism today doesn’t march, it seeps in. It disguises itself as debate, appropriates shared languages, infiltrates art to silence other voices. And when freedom of expression is used to deny that of others, it’s no longer freedom, it’s a strategy of destabilization.”
The defacement of the Bibas family mural is not the first instance of Palombo’s work being disrespected.
In 2024, a mural dedicated to Nova Festival survivor Vlada Patapov was damaged just hours after its unveiling.
Palombo’s murals honoring Auschwitz survivor Sami Modiano, Italian and Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck have also been vandalized in the past.
“My art is not decoration, it is testimony,” Palombo declared. “Anyone who thinks they can erase it with a spray can or a threat has already lost.”
Although Palombo is not Jewish, he informed Digital that he has been inundated with antisemitic insults daily, along with receiving death threats over the past three years.
“The risk of vandalism is real, but it’s not a deterrent, it’s part of the battlefield of memory,” he stated. “Balancing the need to honor the victims with the challenges of public art means accepting that every work is also a stronghold, an act of visual resistance. And if someone defaces it, they don’t weaken it: they make it even more necessary.”