Horror of red hands, wails of empty strollers: Symbolism amid Middle East war

The olive tree, which grows for hundreds, even a thousand years, has evolved into a symbol of resilience in the strife-torn Middle East. This is a region that has laid special emphasis on symbols, which is evident from the Egyptian Ankh, the Star of David and the palm tree. As in life and prosperity, the death and devastation in the Israel-Hamas war have given rise to symbols, and new meanings to old ones. Be it empty strollers, red-painted hands, Palestinian keys or blood-stained trousers.
The Middle East, a region perennially in the doldrums, was thrown into outright chaos as Hamas fighters led a massacre in Israel on October 7 last year. Israeli counter-strikes targeting Hamas turned Gaza areas into rubble. Over 41,000 people have been killed in the year-long conflict, whose flames have been fanned by Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and the government of Iran.
In the fight for existence and regional dominance, it is the poor civilians who have become the casualties of war. In a tragedy of such proportions, where deaths get dehumanised as numbers, it is often the symbolism that reminds us that all those in the throes of agony are people like us.
Among the hundreds of people that Hamas terrorists killed, 38 were children. Forty-two children were also kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
On October 22, 15 days after the attack, Israel placed empty strollers outside the British Parliament in London as a reminder of the babies held hostage by Hamas.
The symbolism wasn’t lost. Instead of the babies in them crying, there were the empty strollers that were wailing.
Within days of the October 7 attack, Israel started bombing Gaza. An Oxfam report, released on September 30, says 11,000 children have been killed in the Israeli offensive in the last 12 months.
In March, around 14,000 pairs of children’s shoes were placed in a public square in Utrecht, a city in the Netherlands, to symbolise the huge tragedy.
Images of small bodies wrapped in shrouds and of emaciated children in Gaza show how kids continue to suffer because of abundant Israeli bombs and lack of food.
As Israel went after Hamas in Gaza, people had to flee to safer areas as their settlements were bombed.
The Palestinian key became a big symbol of the displacement.
People turned refugees in the bombing are holding on to the keys of their homes, which might have been turned into rubble, as their right to return.
This is a tradition since the mass displacement of 1948, known as the Nakba or catastrophe, when Israel came into being. Most of the current refugees are descendants of the people displaced in 1948.

A Syrians hold the symbolic keys as they protest against the Israeli military operation in Lebanon in October 2024. (Photo: Getty Images)

“History is repeating itself. My grandfather took the key and left with it, hoping to come back, and I took the key hoping to return to my apartment and find it as it was,” Hatem Al-Ferani, who was sheltering in a tent in Rafah with his family, told Reuters.
Even in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, giant key installations can be seen in various locations, whose meaning is understood by everyone there, according to a Reuters report.
As images of a bombarding Gaza and its killed people emerged, the call for resistance grew.
As pro-Gaza rallies took place across the world, the keffiyeh, a Beduin headscarf that originated around the 7th Century in the Levant region (now Iraq), became the flag of protesters.
The keffiyeh was mostly worn as protective headgear by shepherds but became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 against the Ottomans.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, donning a keffiyeh. He made the keffiyeh popular. (Image: Getty)

Then it became an identity of the identity-concealing Palestinian terrorists of the 80s, and a fashion accessory globally in the 90s.
In the post-October world, the keffiyeh was used by protesters, including those who set up encampments on American campuses, to depict Palestinian struggles and support the resistance.
Among the several symbols used to highlight that Israel was killing civilians and had blood on its hands was ‘red hands’.
In April, anti-Israel demonstrators flooded the US Capitol, displaying red-painted palms.
The red hands were meant to depict what Shakespeare symbolised in his play Macbeth.
“What hands are here? Ha, they pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” says Macbeth after murdering Duncan.

An Israeli woman with her hands painted red, denoting blood, takes part in a protest against the Israeli government in Tel Aviv in July 2024. (Image: AFP)

However, red hands had assumed a new symbolism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which had to do with the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000.
Bayefsky said that there is a “direct line” between the Ramallah Lynching of 2000 and the October 7 attacks.
“A direct line runs between then [Ramallah lynching of 2000] and October 7, and those who continue to excuse, ignore, celebrate or enable the murder, rape and torture of Jews still going on in the hellholes of Hamas-run Gaza,” Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices, told Fox News Digital on the red-hand Capitol protests.
Two Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) reservists on October 12, 2000, strayed into the Palestinian territory of Ramallah. They were seized by Palestinian Authority police and taken to a police station.

Aziz Salha proudly displays blood on his hands after the killing of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on October 12, 2000 (L). Salha following his arrest in an undated picture provided by the Israeli security services in 2001. (Images: AFP)

A huge mob, baying for Israeli blood, overran the police station, lynched and stabbed the two Israelis. Their bodies were mutilated and dismembered.
Aziz Salha, who was part of the mob and stabbed one of the soldiers, went to the window to showcase his blood-stained hands to the crowd below. That picture remains ingrained in people’s memory and those murderous red hands is what Jews refer to.
As Hamas terrorists went on with their rampage, they did not just kill, but sexually assaulted dozens of Israeli women.
Some of the images of women taken hostage had the ghastly sight of trousers bloodied around the groin area, which suggested gang-rape.
Blood-stained trousers became a symbol of sexual assault and sufferings of women in the conflict.

A protestor in Paris wearing a red-stained trouser, denoting blood, to “denounce the silence of international and feminist organisations” on rapes committed by Hamas during the October 7 attack on Israel. (Image: AFP)

However, people tend to see newer meanings in symbols.
Thousands of pagers by Hezbollah members were detonated by Israel on September 17.
Hezbollah, like Hamas, is a proxy of Iran and had fired over 8,000 rockets into Israel since October 7.
Dozens of those exploding pagers were in the front pockets of the Hezbollah men, and left them crippled and bloodied in the groin area. People were quick to see poetic justice, and bloody trousers gained new symbolism.
October 7, and the Israeli counterattacks since, has come to mean massacre. The date, October 7, is significant and has historical context.
October was the month of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. On the day of Yom Kippur, which was on October 6 in 1973, Arab nations led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. The Yom Kippur War was the fourth of the Arab-Israeli wars and was meant to avenge the humiliation of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The Yom Kippur War, too, ended with a defeat of the Arab forces. Egypt signed the historic Camp David agreement with Israel.
In 2023, Saudi Arabia, a regional Sunni powerhouse, was about to sign an accord with Israel to normalise ties.
The attack on October 7, experts believe, was orchestrated by Iran using Hamas to scuttle the deal. And the date was a reminder of the earlier defeats of the Muslim countries.
Iran has now got directly involved after Israel crippled the Hezbollah and Hamas structure. The present crisis began with the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
People are now fearing a nuclear war.
Former US President Donald Trump said Israel should target Iran’s nuclear facilities in response to the recent missile barrage.
The Guardian quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak saying that Israel could “mount a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target related to its nuclear programme”.
Israel and the US have always wanted to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons technology.
It was also symbolic that the 85-year-old Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, kept a rifle by his side while delivering the Friday sermon, his first in 5 years, on October 4.
As the conflict, which began between Israel and Hamas, enters its second year and becomes a regional war, there are several symbols that remind us of death and devastation. The biggest victims of the brutality of war are the millions of children and women. The best symbols that the Middle East needs now are the age-old olive branches and white doves.