The Story of the Shroud

The Shroud, an enormous white cloth 7.5 meters wide and 25 meters long, bears the handwritten names of 18,457 Palestinian children and young people, aged 0 to 17, killed in Gaza by Israeli hands since October 7, 2023. Among them are many infants, some of whom had not even completed a single day of life. The data were drawn from the latest report issued by Gaza's Ministry of Health, updated as of July 31, 2025. Faced with figures that, over the weeks, have grown ever larger due to Israeli military operations on Gaza, we wanted to give voice, form, and body to these numbers, in order to try to understand and convey just how immense this tragedy is — one that more and more people are now calling genocide. Behind every number is a name, a person, a life that was brutally swept away. These innocent dead must be given back their dignity, having too often been forgotten or treated superficially in our news reports, as if they were "non-human."

During demonstrations, the Shroud is carried in the arms of groups of volunteers, representing the burial shrouds of Gaza's martyred bodies, and is accompanied by a banner reading "Don't forget a single name." It was the words of essayist and journalist Paola Caridi, in her keynote lecture titled "Don't Forget a Single Name – Elegy for the Shrouds of Gaza," delivered during the 2025 edition of the Vicino/Lontano Festival, that inspired us to create this memorial in cloth. The first time the shroud was unfurled was during a demonstration against the soccer match Italy-Israel which took place in Udine on 14 October 2025. Since then, the shroud has travelled in more than 40 localities in Italy, including all major cities such as Rome, Milan, Naples, and Bologna. Staring from fall 2022, it will cross the Italian borders and go to other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Switzerland).

The making of it was led by an association “Carnia per la Pace” in northeast Italy. It was an extraordinary experience that saw the broad and incredible participation of people of all ages, mobilized from across much of our region. Everyone wanted to take part in the writing, even if just a single name. It was an experience full of emotion, a unique experience of unity, solidarity, and humanity. Moments of silent writing alternated with exchanges of reflection, between anger and indignation at what was happening in Palestine. Silences, and tears too. Some, with glistening eyes, said "I didn't think writing a name could be so hard," while others were afraid even to enter the room where the sheet lay, yet found the strength to take part and give their contribution anyway. We saw parents who could not help but think of their own children and grandchildren, young people who looked at all those names and thought of their peers in Palestine, and teachers who, as they wrote, found names similar to those of their own students.

The Shroud is a life experience, a journey to be faced with courage, an act of love. And in its essence it is charged with emotion; it carries many stories within it, and gathers just as many on every journey it makes — uniting us to one another, and uniting us to the Palestinians.

Facebook (Carnia per la Pace) | Instagram (Carnia per la Pace)