Wall of Tears: 50ft Brooklyn mural pays tribute to children killed in Gaza : Shared by Tom McDermott

Walls of Tears ( a.ka. Walls of Shame) are needed in every city as a reminder of the lives of children so needlessly lost. Good project for XUNICEF volunteer community action? Tom

Wall of Tears: 50ft Brooklyn mural pays tribute to children killed in Gaza

David Smith, The Guardian, January 30, 2026

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Summary

Artist Phil Buehler has created a massive memorial installation in Brooklyn, New York, honoring 18,457 children killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and July 19, 2025. 

The Wall of Tears, a 50-foot long, 10-foot tall mural on waterproof vinyl, lists the children's names in the order they died, based on Gaza health ministry data. The installation includes photographs and stories of individual children drawn from Guardian and Washington Post reports. 

The memorial opened Thursday at 12 Grattan Street in Brooklyn, timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the death of five-year-old Hind Rajab, who bled out among six family members' bodies after their car was struck by an Israeli tank. The installation is already outdated, as hundreds more children have been killed since the July data cutoff, including after the October ceasefire. Buehler, who previously created memorial murals for Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and other subjects, worked with non-profit Radio Free Brooklyn on the project.

Quotes

"If you approach from a distance, it looks like almost an abstract painting and that draws people in to see, what is that? Then you'll see they're names of the children killed in Gaza since 7 October and there are thousands of them stretching down the block." - Phil Buehler

"You can't not think about your own kids and your own families. I hope that might lead people to think about how they might help, even if it's just, take a photo of the mural and pass it along on their social media to their friends and family." - Phil Buehler

"This is probably one of the hardest ones I've worked on emotionally. I always think of this quote attributed to Stalin, that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. People can relate to one person's suffering but then they tune out or get overwhelmed by thousands." - Phil Buehler

"I hope with this piece, the Wall of Tears, you can both understand the scale of these 18,457 children's deaths by seeing their names stretching down the street 50 ft and empathise with their surviving families." - Phil Buehler