From the moment the poster campaign featuring the more than 240 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 was pioneered by two Israeli painters, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, anti-Israel agitators have sought to erase those images from the streets of New York City and across the world. 

Yet with each poster that comes down, the artists, along with thousands of citizen volunteers around the world, put one back up. “People cannot forget it,” Ms. Mintz says of the campaign, Kidnapped From Israel, during a phone conversation with the Sun. “It’s been more than two months, and people have already moved on. It’s very hard for us to keep it alive.”

The project, which Ms. Mintz deems “the biggest guerrilla campaign in the world,” gained a new dimension with the return of about 100 hostages following American-backed negotiations last month. With the release of each captive, the artists replaced the red and white “KIDNAPPED” graphic above their photographs with the word “RESCUED” in blue and white letters, the colors of the Israeli flag. 

These rare moments of “optimism” during the war, though, are buffeted by its bleak reality. “When someone is murdered, and it happens all the time,” Ms. Mintz says, “we unfortunately have to put the word murdered in black and white letters.”

The campaign was launched on October 8 by Ms. Mintz along with her husband, who goes by the brush name Mr. Bandaid, alongside Israeli designers Tal Huber and Shira Gershoni. They initially had the help of 15 families of hostages, but the participation grew, within a few days, to 100 families who approached the artists and asked for their relatives to be featured. 

“Although we are not professionals, we have a heart,” Ms. Mintz says, “and we can give them love and show them that us, the public, really, really cares.” Yet the home of the American Jewish diaspora, New York, has become a hotbed of vitriol against the posters and the Jewish state at large. 

This week, a nonprofit executive called a hostage poster he was tearing down in Central Park “war propaganda.” A New York University professor, pulling a poster off a lamppost, explained his action to an observer as making a statement against “Israel’s vicious brutal occupation.” Others have exploited Ms. Mintz’s design, adding above an image of an 8-year-old Israeli hostage, Ella Elyakim, the word “OCCUPIER.” 

“People love to give excuses to cruelty made by other people,” Ms. Nintz says. At the start of the Israel-Hamas war, she explains, some people ripped down posters to make a statement about what they saw as a lack of support for Gazan citizens. Now, “it’s not about being open-minded to the other side, to the Palestinians — it’s about hating Jews,” she says. “The more the time passed, we understood that it’s the same old antisemitism seed that is now blooming again.”

A freshman at Hunter College who was filmed taking down the posters near campus, Jonathan Isla Rampagoa, told the New Yorker that “those ‘kidnapped’ posters are purposefully put there as bait so that people like me, who are aggravated and see those posters, take them down and somebody around the block has their camera ready to film.” He added that if people “really cared about the hostages, they would understand and condemn their own government.”

Ms. Mintz asserts that she does not speak for Israeli leadership. “Nobody that is taking part in this campaign represents our government, and people should not confuse between our love for our country and the lack of support we have for our government,” she says. “But we are all agreeing on one thing, which is removing Hamas and destroying Hamas — not only for us, but also for the Palestinians.”

Asked by the Sun how she gets through the day while her family remains in Israel, Ms. Mintz said she thinks of her grandparents, who fled Warsaw in the 1920s amid rising antisemitism. “They escaped,” she says. “Now I have a country, I have Israel, thank god. So I’m not going to sit there and be hunted all the time. I can push back, and this is exactly what I’m doing.”

The latest phase of the poster project is 10-foot-tall milk carton sculptures, inspired by the milk carton advertisements that publicized cases of missing children in America and Europe in the 1980s. Ms. Mintz’s team displayed the sculptures across Miami during Art Basel earlier this month. While art lovers flocked to the city, Ms. Mintz says, “We wanted them not to close their eyes on our hostage situation.”

An anonymous group of Jewish artists launched another guerrilla art project at Miami during Art Basel. A truck travelled through the city bearing a red LED projection with the words, “may your daughters never be raped while the world justifies it.” 

Ms. Mintz’s mission, through her and her husband’s artwork, is to apply pressure on public officials to push for hostage negotiations. “I cannot save the dead, and I cannot turn the clock backwards and to help and rescue all the women that were raped,” she says. “My SOS mission is to help the ones that are still alive … we can still really do something to save them.”