Hind Rajab was five years old when she was killed in Gaza City in January 2024. Trapped in a car with relatives who had been shot dead around her, she called the Palestine Red Crescent and asked to be rescued. She stayed on the line for hours. The two paramedics sent to reach her were killed as well. Her body was found nearly two weeks later.

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I began this thobe in the first cohort of a thobe class led by Bayan Fares of Badan Collective, among a community of Palestinian women I have come to know in Chicago. The original design is Bayan’s though I have embellished it a bit and made it my own. When I started the thobe, I cut it to my own measurements, because I wanted an Intifada thobe for myself, in the tradition of a garment Palestinian women once made in secret, to protest the occupation, one panel and motif at a time. But the more I stitched, the clearer it became that this was not mine to keep. It needed to be dedicated to Hind.

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Hind's full name sits at the center of the thobe, flanked by red poppies. Below it I am stitching, one by one, the names of the people who were with her and the people who tried to reach her: her cousins Layan, Sana, Raghad and Mohammed, her aunt Anaam and uncle Bashar, and Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. I have kept the same form I use for the children in the doily series, a name, an age or role, and a place.

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I now think of it as the thobe of the woman she would have become. She might have wanted an Intifada thobe of her own. She might have stitched it herself. She was a brave little girl, and I believe she would have grown into a brave woman. A garment made to a grown woman’s measurements, given to a child who never got to grow up, is the closest I can come to giving her that future.

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Every panel and motif is worked by hand, slowly, in the manner of the Palestinian women who made Intifada thobes before me. Hind's thobe is is still a work-in-progress. I am showing it in progress because it takes a long time to complete a theme, sometimes several years. The making of it is as much the work as the final completed thobe.

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The Palestinian thobe functions as a powerful, living act of resistance against cultural erasure and displacement. During the First Intifada (1987–1993), Israeli authorities banned the public display of the Palestinian flag and its colors. Palestinian women responded by creating the "Intifada dress," ingeniously embroidering forbidden national symbols such as, the Palestinian flag, maps, the Dome of the Rock, and olive branches, using flag colors of red, green, white, and black thread.