Naji al-Ali

Naji Salim al-Ali was born in the Galilee village of Al-Shajara and was expelled with his family in 1948 to the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. Working as an auto mechanic and imprisoned repeatedly for his political drawings on prison walls, his genius was discovered in 1961 by the writer Ghassan Kanafani, who published his first cartoon in Al-Hurriya.

Al-Ali produced over forty thousand cartoons for newspapers in Kuwait, Beirut, and London. In 1969, he created Handala, a barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy seen only from behind with hands clasped, who refuses to grow up until he returns to Palestine. Fearlessly satirical toward Arab autocrats and Israeli occupation alike, he was assassinated in London in 1987.