A new mural in Gaza by the anonymous artist Banksy features a kitten seeming to play with a ball of tangled metal rods as if it were yarn. The playful kitty is a jarring contrast to the destruction that surrounds him, but that's Banksy's point. On his website, Bansky says, "A local man came up and said 'Please - what does this mean?' I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens."
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The anonymous but eminent British street artist known as Banksy has posted a mini-documentary on his banksy.co.uk site showing squalid conditions in Gaza six months after the end of the war between the enclave's Islamist Hamas rulers and Israel. Israel was criticized over the large number of Palestinian civilian deaths during the conflict, including by its main ally the United States. Over 2,100 Palestinians were killed during the fighting, most of them civilians and many of them children, while 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians were killed.
The two-minute documentary was posted on Thursday and like many of Banksy's murals and other art is politically charged and whimsical at the same time. It starts off with a view of clouds from an airplane window while text on the screen says "Make this the year you discover a new destination."