A vast public artwork naming 18,457 children killed in Gaza has arrived in Sydney, confronting viewers with individual lives too easily reduced to statistics.
Phil Buehler’s 15-metre-long, three-metre-high public artwork, which names the 18,457 children killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025, is in Sydney. The Wall of Tears was unveiled in Brooklyn, New York, on 29 January this year, and brought to Western Australia in July by the Perth Doctors Medical Aid for Palestine group. After exhibitions in Western Australia and on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra, it is now in Sydney, where the exhibition is supported by Amnesty International Australia. It is on exhibition at Pitt Street Uniting Church until 28 October.
Phil Buehler hopes people will “see the faces, read the stories of some of the few dozen I’ve scattered throughout … that’s the part that gets me when I look at it. You see their faces full of joy and hope, snapshots from graduations and birthday parties and family gatherings and knowing that these kids’ lives were just cut short … I hope that might lead people to think about how they might help, even if it’s just, to take a photo of the mural and pass it along on their social media or to their friends.”
The wall is an invitation to meditate, reflect, grieve and be moved to action.
Around 200 people attended the launch of the Wall of Tears on Friday night. Chris Sidoti, Australia’s former human rights commissioner and member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, spoke of a 14-year-old boy who was shot last November by Israeli soldiers, who then stood around casually for 45 minutes while he bled to death. He emphasised the special legal protections that are owed to children in armed conflict and challenged us to make the Wall of Tears a message of hope: a provocation for peace and justice.
Dr Saira Hussain, a consultant anaesthetist who has completed four volunteer medical missions in Gaza, shared heartbreaking experiences of working with children who had been horrifically injured in bombings.
Suzan Wahhab, president of Palestinian Christians in Australia, spoke of her life as a child in Jerusalem, living side by side with Muslim and Jewish families, and how the violence has escalated since then. Suzan called us all to recognise how Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith traditions each understand human beings as made in the image of God, as loved by God.
Speakers from the Muslim Collective, Hindus for Human Rights, and Jewish and Christian speakers from Sydney Friends of Standing Together each brought calls for compassion, justice and peace.
The many, growing, diverse voices across our country and the world calling for justice and peace in Palestine offer hope.
As Rev Charissa Suli, national president of the Uniting Church, says, “To remain silent about the disproportionate suffering and long-standing oppression faced by Palestinians would be to deny the truth of what we see and can never give us a just peace.”
Pam Batkin
Pam Batkin has just finished 40 years of work as a social worker in Sydney. Most recently she was CEO of a community services agency in the very culturally diverse and vibrant South Western Sydney for 12 years. She is currently travelling with her partner for a year in Europe and the UK.