Banksy's Gaza Film: A Holiday Advert for a Place No One Can Visit

Banksy’s 2015 Film Parodying a Holiday Advert for Gaza

In February 2015 the anonymous British street artist Banksy released a two-minute film called Make this the year YOU discover a new destination. It borrows the look and tone of a glossy holiday advert, then turns the camera on the Gaza Strip six months after the 2014 war: flattened buildings, children playing among ruins, and new murals that Banksy painted on the remains of bombed homes. The joke of the "travel advert" is the point. Gaza is a place almost nobody can visit and few of its residents can leave.

Below is what the film shows, the artworks it introduced, the story of one painted door, and the background a viewer needs to understand it.

Banksy's film, released in February 2015.

What the film shows

The video opens like any upbeat tourism clip, with a promise of somewhere off the beaten track. Instead of beaches and hotels, it follows a route into Gaza and through neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Cheerful on-screen captions play against the images, using the language of travel brochures to describe destruction, isolation and the restrictions on movement in and out of the territory. One caption jokes that locals love the place so much they never leave, before adding that they are not allowed to.

Along the way the film shows Banksy's new works appearing on broken walls, and local children reacting to them. It ends on the kind of slogan an advert would use, here loaded with irony. The format lets viewers who might ignore a news report watch two minutes about Gaza, which appears to be exactly the intent.

The artworks Banksy left in Gaza

The film doubles as an introduction to several murals Banksy painted during the trip:

A kitten. On a surviving wall of a house destroyed in an Israeli air strike, he painted a large, playful kitten. On his website he explained that he wanted to draw attention to the destruction, but online "people only look at pictures of kittens".
A swing. Children's swings appear to hang from a watchtower, turning a symbol of control into play equipment.
Bomb Damage. On a metal door, the last standing part of a family home, he painted a grieving figure crouched against the rubble, widely identified as Niobe from Greek mythology.

The still at the top of this article shows the Niobe door standing in the ruins, as it appears in the film.

The door that was sold for a few hundred dollars

The Bomb Damage door led to one of the stranger stories in Banksy's career. In the myth, Niobe is a mother who weeps endlessly after her children are killed by the gods Apollo and Artemis, a fitting image for families who lost homes and relatives in the war.

The door belonged to the Dardouna family of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. In spring 2015 Rabea Dardouna, who did not know who Banksy was, sold it to a local artist, Belal Khaled, for about 700 shekels, reported as roughly US$175 to US$220. When he learned that Banksy works can sell for very large sums, Dardouna said he had been tricked and asked for it back. Khaled denied any deception, saying he bought the door to protect it and hoped to exhibit it in Gaza. The dispute was widely reported, and coverage at the time did not record a final resolution. The episode raised a real question about street art in poor or war-damaged places: who should benefit when a famous artist paints on someone else's ruined home?

Background: Gaza after the 2014 war

The Gaza Strip is a narrow coastal territory of about 365 square kilometres, home to roughly two million people, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It borders Israel to the north and east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Since 2007, after Hamas took control, Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade, and Israel controls Gaza's airspace and waters. Several rights groups and UN officials have described the result as an "open-air prison", a phrase the film plays on.

The war that preceded Banksy's visit ran from 8 July to 26 August 2014. Around 2,200 Palestinians were killed; a UN Human Rights Council inquiry counted 2,251 deaths, about two-thirds of them civilians. On the Israeli side 67 soldiers and six civilians died. The UN estimated that more than 7,000 homes were destroyed and tens of thousands more damaged, and at the height of the fighting up to half a million people were displaced. The ruins in the film are the result.

Satire as a way in

Banksy has a long record of using humour to deliver political messages. In August 2005 he painted nine images on Israel's West Bank barrier, and in 2017 he opened the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, a working guesthouse where every room faces the wall. The Gaza film fits the same pattern: borrow a familiar format, then let the gap between the format and the reality do the talking.

Asked about the film, his publicist told The New York Times that Banksy did not want to take sides, but argued that neighbourhoods reduced to rubble with no hope of a future become fertile ground for extremism, a problem worth addressing for everyone's sake. Viewers have read the film in different ways, but its format carried images of everyday life amid destruction to an audience that rarely sees them.

Watching it today

Seen from 2026, the film carries extra weight. The war that began after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 caused destruction in Gaza on a scale far beyond 2014, with tens of thousands killed, most of the population displaced and a severe humanitarian crisis. Many places like those in Banksy's film no longer stand. The two-minute "holiday advert" now also works as a record of a moment in Gaza's history, and as a reminder of how much art can say in a short time.

Earlier report: True Activist.

Sources: Wikipedia: Banksy; CBC News: Gaza man says he was tricked into selling Banksy painting; Institute of Art and Law: Banksy, Niobe and the 'duped' man from Gaza; Wikipedia: 2014 Gaza War; Wikipedia: Gaza Strip. Film and artworks: Banksy.

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