The notion that a picture is worth a thousand words gains fresh, disturbing meaning when that picture is a Joe Sacco drawing.

Mr. Sacco, who specializes in covering wars that mainstream media underplay, outdoes himself in this balanced, sad account of 1956 incidents in which the Israeli military massacred hundreds of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah, impoverished towns in the Gaza Strip, then governed by Egypt.

A fearless war journalist and Maltese native who grew up in Australia and the United States, Mr. Sacco has covered similar terrain in "Palestine" and "Safe Area Goradze," other graphic novels designed to unearth, explain and prevent atrocity.

While he is driven by anger and curiosity, Mr. Sacco's goals are compassion and humane treatment. Animating his powerful, black-and-white art is the evil that men do in the name of nationalism.

His fury flows freely in "Footnotes," a long, at times numbing probe of the Israel Defense Forces' decision to shoot and beat Arabs in the name of "screening" them for terrorist impulses.

While Mr. Sacco focuses on Israeli actions against Palestinians in these grindingly poor communities, he doesn't dwell exclusively on the oppressors. He also conveys the ambience of these towns, particularly by conjuring Sea Street, Rafah's main thoroughfare, so vibrant and boisterous it makes the side streets even more alarming.

Mr. Sacco interviews scores of old Arab men to get at the truth. Sifting through their porous recall to reach a factual core, then underscoring that with research on site and at the United Nations archives in New York, provides a balance not immediately clear in drawings he weights toward the Palestinians.

He rarely reveals his own feelings, portraying himself as a weak-chinned, bespectacled observer whose eyes lack pupils, as if he were merely absorbent. Sometimes his emotions break through, however.

These accounts are largely based on the stories of old men that Mr. Sacco accumulated with the help of younger, equally war-weary men like Hani and the Fatah acolyte, Khaled, who want to live in peace -- and fight for that right.

His re-creation of the Rafah massacre, in which Israeli soldiers screened Palestinians to root out terrorists, unfolds like a nightmare as it swings between images of fearful crowds and bloodstained close-ups of brutality.

Mr. Sacco divides the book by suburb, targeting Khan Younis first, then Rafah. "I don't need to tell you, memories change with the years, and the memories we have excavated here are decades old," he tells us. "Memory blurs edges, it adds and subtracts."

To sharpen it, he crafts individual stories, contrasting the oral history he so lovingly cultivates with official reports from newspaper and government sources.

Mr. Sacco effectively intersperses his historical re-creations, partially based on period photos, with depictions of the ambience in 2002 and 2003, when he traveled to the area for his research.

Khan Younis and Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, are hemmed in by Israel to the east and Egypt to the south. Their inhabitants live tense, dangerous lives in the shadow of fortified Israeli observation towers, and in Rafah, the IDF routinely demolish their homes, ostensibly to destroy tunnels intifada warriors use to bring in weapons. The narrative is complex, the way Mr. Sacco crosscuts between periods artful and challenging. But there's never any doubt about the authenticity of his art. Mr. Sacco packs his pages, popping quote boxes out of the panels, slicing and dicing pages into kinetic rectangles to maximize tension and drive narrative.

His grief, dedication and singular, populist artistry command respect and silence.

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