Rafah a town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip is a squalid place Raw concrete buildings front rubbish-strewn alleys The narrow streets are crowded with young children & unemployed men Situated on the border with Egypt swaths of Rafah have been reduced to rubble Rafah is today & has always been a notorious flashpoint in this most bitter of conflicts Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956 that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead shot by Israeli soldiers Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing that day in Rafah
- coldblooded massacre or dreadful mistake
- reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war In a quest to get to the heart of what happened Joe Sacco arrives in Gaza & immersing himself in daily life uncovers Rafah past & present Spanning fifty years moving fluidly between one war & the next alive with the voices of fugitives & schoolchildren widows & sheikhs Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy As in Palestine & Safe Area Gorazde Joe Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant meticulous detail Footnotes in Gaza his most ambitious work to date transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate & immediate experience