Israel has become a pariah state. Its leaders—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and many others—are alleged war criminals under investigation by the International Criminal Court. Even before launching its genocide in Gaza in response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel’s decades-old colonial settler policies imprisoned an entire generations of Palestinian in the occupied cities and towns of the West Bank.
In his new book, Welcome to Hell, Palestinian graphic artist and political cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh documents the specific contours of life amid this type of genocide powerfully and unnervingly. Welcome to Hell is a follow-up to his acclaimed 2021 graphic novel Power Born of Dreams, which tells the story of his five-month incarceration in an Israeli military detention center in 2013. His newest book chronicles the struggle to simply exist in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and in particular, in Israeli detention facilities and prisons.
Sabaaneh has become internationally acclaimed for an incisive style that exposes the political conditions of contemporary Palestine under brutal Israeli control. The images he creates are both poignant and defiant, reflecting the spirit of resistance and resilience of the women, men, and children trying to survive amid these surroundings.
Street Noise Books
Street Noise Books, 120 pages. Publication date: June 16, 2026.
Welcome to Hell is mostly told from the vantage point of Sabaaneh’s brother Thamer, who served thirteen months in an Israeli prison in 2023. The book’s opening page eloquently describes his plight and that of his entire people: “They are all in a big prison.” The accompanying image of Sabaaneh, rendered in his stark black-and-white style, shows him in a state of consternation. Sabaaneh had been traveling in Europe on a promotional tour when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and friends urged him to remain there. But he chose instead to return to his community in the West Bank, fighting his resignation and clinging to the hope of continued Palestinian resistance. As Sabaaneh states plainly: “WE DO NOT LEAVE.”
Sabaaneh then recounts his journey from Amman, Jordan, back into Palestine alongside his brother. Such journeys are always precarious: The daily reality of life under Israeli occupation is one in which settler attacks and checkpoints are constant threats. During their taxi ride home, the brothers’ luck runs out: An Israeli military Jeep intercepts them, and soldiers jump out, brandishing weapons and shouting orders to exit the taxi. They hadn’t committed any crimes or engaged in any suspicious behavior. But they were Palestinians—always grounds for harassment and brutality amid the military domination of a racially profiled and subjugated population.
The illustration of this scene conveys that reality with unnerving accuracy. Sabaaneh depicts the soldiers menacingly barking out orders, making motorists and passengers fear for their lives. Their faces reveal a total lack of compassion or humanity—only sheer contempt for those they regard as less than fully human.
Sabaaneh is beaten to the ground during this encounter, and Thamer is dragged away. He returns bruised and in pain. When Sabaaneh finally returns home, he’s trapped in Ramallah by lockdowns and strict Israeli checkpoints, unable to travel to Jenin to see his aging parents.
But he gathers his courage anyway, and braves the settlers and checkpoints to visit Thamer’s children. The poignant scene in which Sabaaneh and his young nephew ask to see his father is almost too difficult to bear. But it accurately reflects the human dimension of life in the greater prison that is contemporary Palestine.
Within that greater prison, Sabaaneh shows us, there are still worse horrors kept just out of sight. In the second part of Welcome to Hell, he provides an appalling account of the occupation’s prisons. The visual and verbal descriptions read like the worst examples of Jim Crow-era American prisons, like the Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi or the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, or of apartheid South Africa. Each page depicts another horror: beatings, forced nudity, sexual assaults, confinement in total darkness––virtually every instrument of torture that can be found in prisons.
Human rights organizations have attempted to call international attention to these horrors for years, especially in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Amnesty International, Human Rights Campaign, and the Red Cross all have issued scathing reports about egregious Israeli violations of Palestinians’ rights and dignity while incarcerated, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has confirmed these reports.
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Sabaaneh’s drawings lay bare the human reality of these conditions. In one image, he shows a Palestinian inmate lying on the ground with his head beneath the foot of the Israeli guard. The caption says it all: “The soldiers crushed our heads under their boots.”
On another page, a double image poignantly captures how it feels to be a young Palestinian stuck in the unspeakable horror of an Israeli dungeon. In the top portion of the illustration, Sabaaneh sits dreaming of his family, including his youngest relatives—people he believes he may never see again. The text that appears alongside a fractured heart in the lower half of the image makes his fears explicit: “I fear that we will be crushed from the inside . . . broken.”
Thousands of former prisoners feel the same. The horrible reality of being separated from one’s family indefinitely is difficult to imagine, as are the devastating long-term psychological implications that persist even in cases when families are reunited. Access to mental health treatment is marginal or even nonexistent in Palestine. Some who are struggling with trauma may turn to violence against their Israeli occupiers; others may turn their aggression toward family members, or even inward to lifelong depression and anxiety.
While Sabaaneh’s brother was enduring the misery of incarceration for thirteen months beginning in 2023, Israel was in the midst of its barbarous assault on Gaza outside the prison walls. One of Sabaaneh’s illustrations shows an Israeli aircraft dropping leaflets ordering residents to evacuate their homes, forcing people to flee in panic. The image depicts massive internal migration and houses in flames—a small glimpse of the overwhelming devastation that has characterized Gaza since October 2023.
In subsequent pages, Sabaaneh depicts the most brutal realities of life in Gaza: hastily erected tents, prized possessions lost in rubble, families separated, burials, and people losing any semblance of their identities. Some will never recover; the grief is too great. Some will become resistance fighters and politicians. Still others will likely become future terrorists, ensuring that instability will dominate the region for decades to come. The artist reveals, as artists have historically done, the tragic human realities of warfare and genocide.
But the book concludes on a more hopeful note—with an image of a Palestinian embracing a flower as it transforms into full bloom. “With spring,” Sabaaneh writes, “there is always another season.”
This is in part what makes Welcome to Hell such an urgent and vital book. Mohammad Sabaaheh stands in a long and honorable tradition of visual artists who use their work to challenge power and express the truth, even under the possible threat of severe retaliation, including imprisonment, injury, or death. It’s difficult to view Sabaaneh’s harsh and heartbreaking drawings.
But as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, it’s especially painful to be reminded that Israeli leaders and Israeli Defense Forces soldiers—some of whose grandparents and great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, and comparable hellholes—are now perpetuating similar crimes. The truth must be told and retold.
Despite the Ministry of Health reporting more than 72,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza since October 2023 (an estimate excluding non-violent deaths, such as those who died indirectly due to starvation or disease); despite the horrific conditions in Israeli prisons and detention centers; despite the growth of illegal settlements in the West Bank and the monstrous violence of the settlers, and so much more, the Palestinian people will endure.