A star-studded list of musicians including Brian Eno, R.E.M’s Michael Stipe and Fontaines D.C’s Carlos O’Connell among others have read out letters from Palestinians suffering in Gaza as part of of the ‘Voices For Gaza’ initiative.
This initiative shows several famous names from the world of entertainment read out letters from those in Palestine, recalling graphic details from the ongoing war.
This initiative is aimed at raising funds for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, and awareness to this ongoing crisis.
According to the reports at the time of writing, 34,600 Palestinians have been killed in this conflict. Last year, the attacks by Hamas on October led to the deaths of over 1,200 people.
‘Voices For Gaza’
As part of the initiative, many household names read out letters from Gaza civilians.
Reading out a letter from a civilian in Gaza, Brian Eno recalls an eyewitness account of a person who has just found their childhood home bombed, and seeing his father being forced to queue for hours to access water.
The letter also talks about the amount of people in Gaza who are being subjected to seeing the bodies of their loved ones being decomposed in the street. Check that out here.
Elsewhere, Michael Stipe also read out a letter for ‘Voices For Gaza’, which was written by a civilian who wrote about how he lost several siblings in the bombings. The letter also added that more and more children are dying in the conflict.
Meanwhile, Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines D.C also read out a very moving letter for Voices For Gaza.
This letter was written by Walaa Barbakh in January. It says that their late daughter is being desecrated, “bodies [were] thrown everywhere”. They also had to ask to retrieve the body. Check that out here.
“not going to forgotten”
Other names to take part in the initiative also include Tom Morello, Serj Tankian, Brian Cox, Susan Sarandon, Carice van Houten and Liam Cunningham.
Cunningham had previously hit out at people at Hollywood who he claimed are comfortable “ignoring” the situation in Gaza.
“The people who didn’t talk – it is not going to be forgotten. It’s livestreamed this genocide – and the option to say you didn’t know is not an option. You did know and you did nothing, you stayed quiet. I need to be able to look in the mirror and that’s why I speak”, he said.
Back in April, singer Bobby Gillespie and Eric Cantona also performed a track that the Frenchman wrote for Palestine called, ‘Give Us A Ticket’. More on that here.
