Israeli painters Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid didn’t know what to do on October 7. Living in New York City while her nation faced the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, Ms. Mintz felt “so far away, isolated, and hopeless,” she tells the Sun. “We wanted to scream. We wanted the world to know that Israel had been attacked brutally, and that people are kidnapped and we need help.”

Determined to raise awareness of the crisis, the duo looked to the realm they knew best: art. With the help of a friend, a graphic designer in Israel, Tal Huber, they came up with the design for posters that would be easy to duplicate. They bear the photos and names of the Israeli hostages taken to Gaza, alongside the word “KIDNAPPED” and a message imploring viewers, “please help bring them home alive.” 

The next day, Ms. Mintz and her partner, Mr. Bandaid, the brush name by which the artist goes, printed 2,000 copies, acquired numerous rolls of duct tape, and plastered those posters across Manhattan. Yet Ms. Mintz recalls that the strangers she approached on the street didn’t want to help out. “They didn’t care about the situation in Israel,” she reflects. “We were so depressed.” The two artists went home that night, thinking: “Israel is actually going to be wiped out from the face of earth.”

“We are alone in this,” they thought. It turned out, though, that they were not. The next morning, the posters abounded on street posts, inside subways, and on campus buildings throughout the city. Ms. Mintz had shared the designs on Dropbox and they went viral on social media. The file soon collapsed due to the high volume of downloads, so she quickly built a website. Now, the effort has exploded across Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. 

“The biggest guerrilla campaign in the world” is how Ms. Mintz describes the success. “People really responded to our call, because there are many people that feel the same that we do — that if they don’t act, then nobody will.” Asked by the Sun which nationalities are most fervently participating in the campaign, she says, “All the Israelis around the world, they do it. That’s not a question.”

In the first couple days of the war, Ms. Mintz, Mr. Bandaid, and Ms. Huber had the names of 15 people believed to be held by Hamas. The trio is now working with 150 families who have asked to feature their relatives in the campaign. “It’s heartbreaking, those calls,” Ms. Mintz says, her voice punctuated by pain. Every day, new posters are produced as the number of suspected hostages climbs to more than 200.

Just as quickly as the posters went up, though, many of them have been torn down. Within hours of being taped to subway walls, some posters were torn up, obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives. Others were defaced with the words “free Palestine.” On one street in London, photos of the hostages, many of them young children, were vandalized with devil horns and mustaches resembling Hitler’s. 

“These are real kids kidnapped by Hamas, sitting now in dark tunnels below Gaza with a gun pointing to their heads,” Ms. Mintz says. She argues that pro-Palestinian protesters should not use these posters as political platforms. “You can do your own campaign to bring awareness to freeing Palestine, if that’s what you believe,” she says. “But if you go and tear down baby’s faces that are now held as hostages, you are not a good person. ”

This fury makes 2023 feel like 1936, as one observer described the London vandals. “It became very trendy now on social media to hate Israelis and Jews,” Ms. Mintz explains. “It’s not only we need to protect our lives,” she says, as Hamas’s war has now killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. “Now the world really, really wants all of us to death.” She adds: “Let’s not forget the mastermind Iran. They are the reason Hamas even exists.”

In the face of anti-Israel vitriol, artists, in Ms. Mintz’s view, have the power to bridge the gap between the creative and the political. “Art has a very therapeutic power, and art can change people’s way of thinking,” Ms. Mintz says. It can “release pain” and “bring some humanness” in a time of suffering, she adds. “I believe that all the artists need to do something right now.” 

Ms. Mintz worked for 15 years as a “visual poet,” which involved painting large murals in public places. She says that “it was easy for us to work in the public sphere.” She and Mr. Bandaid took inspiration from the milk carton advertisements that publicized cases of missing children in America and Europe in the 1980s. These would’ve taken months to replicate, though, she says. “We wanted to do something immediately and not to wait, not even for one second.” 

While 360,000 or more Israelis have been called for reserve military duty, some have found the time and space to spread awareness of Hamas’s violence. A Eurovision star, Noa Kirel, whom the Sun interviewed this month, helped post “KIDNAPPED” signs in Times Square at New York. Actress Gal Gadot also shared the images on social media. The creator of the hit Israeli television series “Fauda,” Lior Raz, has been producing short films on the hostage crisis. 

For Ms. Mintz, running a multinational activist effort has become a full-time commitment. “We left our jobs, we left our lives,” she says. Some of its leaders, like Ms. Huber, are committing thousands of their own dollars to the campaign. Yet it has now taken on a life of its own. “It’s so much bigger than the people who built it,” Ms. Mintz says. “It belongs to thousands of people now.”