The Shooting of Naji al-Ali

On 22 July 1987, outside the London offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas on Ives Street, an unidentified gunman shot the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in the neck. He never regained consciousness, and died on 29 August 1987. The murder has never been solved; the investigation touched Mossad double agents inside the PLO, and London police reopened the case in 2017, thirty years on, without result.

Al-Ali was born around 1938 in al-Shajara, a village between Tiberias and Nazareth destroyed in 1948, and grew up in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. Across a career in Kuwaiti and Lebanese newspapers — al-Siyasa, al-Safir, and from 1985 al-Qabas in London — he produced some 40,000 drawings, unsparing toward Israel, toward the Arab regimes, and toward the Palestinian leadership alike. No one was spared the pen, and by the 1980s he was among the most widely read — and most threatened — political cartoonists in the Arab world.

His signature became one of the most recognizable images in Palestinian culture: Handala, a barefoot ten-year-old refugee, drawn always from behind, hands clasped at his back. Al-Ali said the child would not grow up until he could return to his homeland. Handala witnessed every cartoon and outlived its maker — still drawn on walls across Palestine and the diaspora: the refugee child standing, waiting, facing Palestine.