At the end of a dramatic day yesterday during which all 20 remaining living Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences, and around 1,700 Gazans detained after 7 October 2023 were released, the bodies of four of the 28 remaining deceased hostages were also transferred to Israel. According to Hamas, these are the bodies of Bipin Joshi, Daniel Peretz, Yossi Sharabi and Guy Illouz—among the 251 people taken captive from Israel and held by Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza since the attack two years ago.
Among the 24 hostages whose remains have not yet been repatriated to Israel but are expected to be released in the coming days under the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement is 27-year-old graffiti artist and art student Inbar Haiman—the only female still remaining in Hamas captivity.
Abducted
Haiman was abducted from the Nova Music Festival, where she had gone in an official capacity to assist any partygoers who got into distress during the festival, taking at least three of her paintings to sell. She was abducted alive, as confirmed by a video of her kidnapping recorded by Hamas, but in December 2023 the Israeli army announced she had been killed in captivity. The circumstances of her death remain unclear.
Haiman was due to begin the fourth and final year of her visual communication degree at WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education, intending to pursue a career in design. Alongside her studies, she had begun experimenting with poster and jewellery design. “In situations where it was necessary to invent, imagine and describe completely amorphic things—her ability to create worlds ‘from her head’ is at its height,” Yaron Shin, one of her instructors and the head of the Visual Communication Department at WIZO, told Portfolio magazine in October 2023.
“As soon as she has an idea, even if it’s in a technique or format that she doesn’t know at all, whether its sculpture or three-dimensional modelling, she’ll sit and study it from scratch until she gets the result she wants,” Haiman’s classmate, Naomi Goldstein, told Portfolio. “Creativity is something she lives for, something inseparable from her.”
Haiman was also a known graffiti artist who had started creating street art around age 15, and went by the tags the Pink Question (ultimately shortened to Pink) and the Pink Raven. Israeli graffiti artists began calling for Haiman’s release in her medium of choice soon after her abduction, painting the message “Free Pink” in high-visibility locations as well as near her parents’ home in Petah Tikva. Other graffiti artists based outside Israel, such as the collective Broken Fingaz, advocated for her release in street art form overseas.
Rest in paint
After Haiman was proclaimed dead, her classmates painted the message “RIP Pink: Rest in Paint” on Haifa’s HaAtzmaut Street, near the art school Haiman had attended. Over the past two years there have also been efforts to protect graffiti works by Haiman, and this past May one of Haiman’s last known graffiti tags (painted on a steel plate attached to a building on Haifa’s Hahalutz Street) was salvaged and transferred to her family.
RIP Pink appeared on streets after Haiman was proclaimed dead
After the partial release of deceased hostages yesterday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum released a statement. It declared: “This is a brazen violation of the agreement by Hamas. We expect the Israeli government and the mediators to act immediately to remedy this terrible injustice.”
Last month, as part of her ongoing efforts to demand the return of Haiman’s remains, her aunt Hannah Cohen told the Times of Israel that “her mother needs a grave to go to, to speak to her daughter, to light a candle when she needs to.” She added, “The mind plays tricks when there’s no closure; it sends a person to all kinds of places.”
