Activists unfurl banner at Madrid museum to demand Gaza ceasefire

MADRID (Reuters) - Rights and environmental activists demanding a ceasefire in Gaza unfurled a giant picture of a Palestinian child crying for help above the entrance to Madrid's Reina Sofia museum, home to Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica" that depicts the horrors of war.

In Wednesday's action, global campaigning group Greenpeace and the Unmute Gaza movement that supports photojournalists reporting from the war zone used a banner with an illustration by U.S. artist Shepard Fairey based on an image taken by Gazan photographer Belal Khaled.

"Can you hear us?" read the caption, with "Ceasefire now" emblazoned below. Police and firefighters watched on without intervening.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October in response to an attack by the Hamas group that runs the enclave, which killed 1,200 people and captured around 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health authorities, by as asault that has turned much of the enclave to a wasteland.

Picasso's mural-sized work housed at the museum, inspired by a Nazi air raid on the northern Spanish town of Guernica in 1937 that killed as many as 1,600 people, is widely considered one of the anti-war masterpieces of 20th century art.

(Reporting by Susana Vera and Guillermo Martinez; Writing by Emma Pinedo; Editing by Peter Graff)