Media Shrapnel, Cartooning as Urgent Care: Emergency Witnessing in Mazen Kerbaj’s Gaza in My Phone

by Dr. Velebita Koričančić, Mexico City

Content advisory: This book provides graphic depictions (this review provides textual descriptions) and traumas of war.

In Gaza in My Phone, Lebanese, Berlin-based artist Mazen Kerbaj turns to political cartooning in response to Israel’s war on Gaza from October 2023 onward, drawing images of Palestinian injury that reach him through his phone. From its cover, the book takes a position on how to witness atrocities committed against Palestinians: inside the frame of a phone, a burning building explodes, yet no injured human body appears. Care begins here as a decision about what not to show. In this way, Kerbaj extends Susan Sontag’s concerns in Regarding the Pain of Others[1] into the phone age, asking how images of bodily catastrophe can compel attention without turning suffering into spectacle. At the intersection of cartooning and war journalism, Gaza in My Phone turns mediated shock into urgent care, however fragile that care may be. The book raises questions crucial to Graphic Medicine: how can one witness mass injury without consuming it visually, and how can one respond when care is necessary but tragically insufficient?

The overall structure of Gaza in My Phone is composed of fragments, with each page standing alone like an emergency unit. Drawing on media reports, the pages feel self-contained and immediate. They return the reader again and again to the present tense of atrocity. This fragmentary structure operates metaphorically as “media shrapnel”: images, names, scenes, and captions are strewn like broken pieces from the screen, reaching Kerbaj as repeated and injurious splinters that demand response. There is no healing arc or promise of recovery, only a present suspended in a loop. Kerbaj draws from within an ongoing emergency. Cartooning becomes a form of urgent care. It stays with the wound without pretending to close it.

The book fills this suspended emergency present with mass injury rendered through repetition. Bodies appear through serial forms: human remains in black bags or white shrouds, or as fields of skulls. The visual force of these terrifying images comes from accumulation: as death piles up, repetition makes mass killing visible as a pattern. In the body-bag images, the repeated form both hides and insists on the body; in the maternity-ward cartoon, numbered babies turn neonatal care into a scene of catastrophe. These images connect the book to mass-casualty medicine and public-health collapse. Kerbaj’s cartoons ask what care can mean when injury is collective, when hospitals fail, and when bodies must be counted, named, identified, and mourned at scale.

Another form of care is visual restraint. While the captions often state atrocity explicitly, the drawings approach bodily trauma through objects, blanks, and indexical signs. In one image, a child’s amputated arm is drawn as a hand marked with a dotted cutting line and scissors. In another, a hospital bed with only a pillow bearing a bullet-like wound suggests what has taken place. A saw stands in for an amputation without anesthesia, while a blank square where a head should be marks decapitation without showing it. The pattern continues, as does the reality it records. The fraction “½” conveys the horror of a child’s fragmented body through an impersonal mathematical sign. A forearm on which a child writes their own name anticipates the need for identification after death. These details function as synecdoche, with a part, an object, or a mark standing for massive bodily devastation.  Yet the cartoons do not let injury remain abstract. The captions return the reader to specific persons (this child, this father, this patient, this named body) and to their familial and social bonds. For this reason, Kerbaj witnesses atrocity without turning the injured body into spectacle.

The page with the “To-Draw List” also singularizes the violence (a baby, a sister, a boy on a hospital floor, a young boy and his younger brother, a grandfather, children, a prisoner, a mother) refusing to let these scenes of war violence against civilians disappear into abstraction. That gesture makes evident the book’s concern with bodily crisis and how time is experienced under emergency conditions. Atrocity appears as a list: scenes waiting to be drawn. The crisis is not only unrepresentable; it is unending. Violence arrives faster than cartooning can respond to it; there are more scenes of injury in Gaza than any drawing can process. Although the page is presented as a list of future images, it is already a drawing: a record of atrocities before they can be transformed into cartoons. Its starred entries resemble tasks, but each “task” names a death, wound, or scene of grief waiting to be addressed. In a self-reflexive move, the notebook format suggests artistic process. But cartooning becomes overwhelmed care: incomplete, strained, and unable to keep pace, yet committed to preserving singular lives within mass injury. This is the book’s crucial intervention for Graphic Medicine: it positions urgent care as attention under conditions of war violence, mediated through political cartooning.

Dr. Velebita Koričančić (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2941-1471) is a Croatian professor-researcher, born in Zagreb and based in Mexico City. She holds a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies, cum laude, from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and a PhD in Comparative Literature, with honors, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is an Assistant Professor at Anahuac Mexico University’s School of Communication and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Latin American Studies at UNAM’s School of Philosophy and Letters. She is also a Candidate-level member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and a literary translator.

[1] Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.