num_pages: 432
description: From the great cartoonist-reporter a sweeping original investigation of a forgotten crime in the most vexed of places Rafah a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956 that left 111 Palestinians dead shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing that day in Rafahcold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistakereveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened Joe Sacco immerses himself in daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years moving fluidly between one war and the next alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren widows and sheikhs Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy. As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorade Saccos 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 an intimate and immediate experience. 
language: English
title: Footnotes in Gaza
publisher: Metropolitan Books