A mural in Milan, Italy honoring victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel has been defaced for the second time in under a month, Canada-based outlet The J reported on Monday.
The mural portrays Shiri Bibas, 32, and her two children, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months, who were kidnapped into Gaza on Oct. 7 and murdered in captivity.
Titled “October 7, The Hostages,” the piece, unveiled outside the Qatari consulate in central Milan in early October, shows Bibas embracing her children, wrapped in an Israeli flag, while staring outward with a grim countenance. Ariel’s and Kfir’s hair is painted bright orange.
An updated image of the mural, however, shows that it had been smeared with white paint.
The artwork was created by contemporary pop artist AleXsandro Palombo, whose public works about the Oct. 7 massacre, the Holocaust and antisemitism have been repeatedly vandalized over the past year.
In the wake of the first attack against the mural, Palombo told Fox News Digital on Oct. 29 that “The fact that a mural dedicated to a mother and her two children who were murdered can be defaced without provoking public outrage is the symptom of a sick society and a sign of political and cultural weakness.”
He added: “In recent years, parts of the political left and activist movements have ended up legitimizing extremist pro-Palestinian factions that don’t speak of peace, but of hatred. They don’t defend the rights of Palestinians, they exploit them, effectively promoting the propaganda of Hamas’s throat-cutters.”
In the first incident, which occurred shortly after the work’s unveiling, the face of Shiri Bibas was covered with a poster of a red bullseye stamped on a boy’s forehead with the words, “NO WAR.”
Palombo called the act “a serious desecration. That face was not chosen to add meaning, but to obscure it. It is an attempt to replace a specific, painful and documented memory with a generic, emotional image that mocks and lends itself easily to manipulation. It is a way of stripping suffering of its significance, turning it into an ideological mask,” per Fox News Digital.
Palombo who is not Jewish, said that he receives antisemitic insults daily, along with the occasional death threat.
According to The J, Italian authorities have launched investigations into the defacements of other public works by Palombo, and have identified a suspect in connection with the vandalism of Holocaust memorial murals. “Prosecutors have pursued charges including aggravated damage motivated by discrimination in some cases,” the outlet added.
“The level of pro-Hamas propaganda in Italy is insane,” Davide Romano, director of the Museum of the Jewish Brigade in Milan, told JNS in July, citing the appearance of posters reading “Israeli not welcome” in his city.
Walker Meghnagi, president of the Jewish Community of Milan, said in an interview published in Il Giorno on Monday: “The legislation on so-called hate crimes is insufficient, it does not protect, it does not prevent. We see it every day now.”
Under Italy’s 1993 penal code, the sentence for assault may be increased by up to half the base sentence if the crime was aggravated by racist or xenophobic hatred.
