When Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges traveled to the Gaza Strip in 2001 for Harper’s magazine, they researched a little-known mass killing from 1956. But when the piece, written by Hedges and illustrated by Sacco, was published, editors had cut the entire section about Israeli soldiers killing hundreds of Palestinians during the Suez crisis.
That snub inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” Sacco’s celebrated 2009 long-form comic book. Shifting back and forth between 1956 and the present day, he describes the killings of nearly 400 Palestinians in the neighboring towns of Khan Younis and Rafah.
