First is وسام اياد محمد ابو فسيفس, or Wesam Iyad Mohammed Abu Fsaife, a 14-year-old boy. Last is صباح عمر سعد المصري, or Sabah Omar Saad al-Masri, an eight-year-old girl.

These names of these two children mark the beginning and end of the Wall of Tears, a massive art installation paying homage to the 18,457 children killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025. Created by artist Phil Buehler, it opened next to Pine Box Rock Shop bar at 12 Grattan Street in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday.

Made of waterproof and UV-coated vinyl, the 50ft long, 10ft tall sand-coloured mural lists the children killed in Gaza by the order in which they died, based on data from the Gaza health ministry. This will be punctuated by photos and stories of individual children, drawing on reports by the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers.

“If you approach from a distance, it looks like almost an abstract painting and that draws people in to see, what is that?” Buehler, 69, says by phone. “Then you’ll see they’re names of the children killed in Gaza since 7 October and there are thousands of them stretching down the block.

“Then you’ll be drawn in further, I hope, to see the faces, read the stories of some of the few dozen I’ve scattered throughout the fence. That’s the part that gets me when I look at it. You see these 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.”

The artist reflects: “You can’t not think about your own kids and your own families. I hope that might lead people to think about how they might help, even if it’s just, take a photo of the mural and pass it along on their social media to their friends and family because hearing something from someone you know is important.”

Buehler has previously designed huge murals including Wall of Lies, displaying more than 20,000 lies told by Donald Trump during his first term as president; the Wall of Liars and Deniers, listing 381 Republican election deniers running in the 2022 midterms; the Wall of Shame, chronicling the actions of more than 1,500 January 6 rioters; and Empty Beds, highlighting the abduction of nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children by Russia.

He worked on the Wall of Tears with his regular collaborator, the non-profit Radio Free Brooklyn. The project is necessarily out of date before it opens: it only records deaths up until last July because that was the most recent update to the Gaza health authorities’ database; hundreds more children have been killed since then, even after an October ceasefire.

“This is probably one of the hardest ones I’ve worked on emotionally,” Buehler says. “I always think of this quote attributed to Stalin, that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. People can relate to one person’s suffering but then they tune out or get overwhelmed by thousands and the destruction and death in Gaza is one of those stories.

“I hope with this piece, the Wall of Tears, you can both understand the scale of these 18,457 children’s deaths by seeing their names stretching down the street 50 ft and empathise with their surviving families.”

Despite harsh weather, Buehler opened the installation on Thursday to coincide with the second anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old left to bleed out among the bodies of six family members after their car was targeted by an Israeli tank, leaving it with 335 bullet holes, according to the Forensic Architecture research group.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society released audio recordings of Hind’s final hours, documenting repeated, urgent requests for rescue and call handlers, increasingly distressed themselves, assuring her that help was on the way. This real-life audio can be heard in the The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Tunisian film by the director Kaouther Ben Hania that has been nominated for an Oscar in the international feature category.

Buehler says: “The film is incredibly gut wrenching and it does deserve an Academy award because it’s a reenactment of the call, where the Red Crescent are taking the call, but the voice is hers. She’s on the phone. She’s five and she’s pleading, come get me. This innocent five-year-old kid has become the image of the tragedy there.”

The war in Gaza has been a divisive issue in New York, which with nearly 1 million Jews has the biggest Jewish population outside Israel. Efforts to brand Zohran Mamdani, a champion of Palestinian rights, as antisemitic, fell flat as he won election to become New York’s first Muslim mayor.

Buehler rejects the notion that opposition to the war equates to antisemitism. “Conflating those two things makes it more difficult to talk about,” he says. “You can’t have that conversation at all. I worry a little bit about that with this piece.

“I talked to a lot of both Palestinian and Jewish friends. Most of my Jewish friends are liberal Jews and their reaction was, it’s a tragedy, their heart goes out for these kids and these families, but they are afraid bringing attention to it will bounce back as antisemitism.

“So Jews are afraid of bringing attention to it and Palestinians are afraid of bringing attention to it because it bounces back against them. This moment in time in our culture and our world is not one for open dialogue. It’s so split, so tribal. ‘If you are against killing the kids in Gaza then you must be against Jews.’ That’s not true.”