Waters and Palestinian singer Miari rework 'Comfortably Numb' as Gaza tribute

Roger Waters has published a new version of Pink Floyd's 1979 classic 'Comfortably Numb', rebuilt as a nine-minute piece performed alongside Palestinian singer Mona Miari. The track, titled 'Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined', features new English and Arabic lyrics and a video incorporating footage filmed in Gaza. All proceeds will go to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

The song's central refrain has been inverted. Where the original closes with "I have become comfortably numb," Waters and Miari now sing: "I will never become comfortably numb." A newly composed section by Miari, called 'Hind's Lullaby', draws on the killing of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who died alongside family members in Gaza in January 2024.

Speaking to WIRED, Waters said he hopes listeners a decade from now will regard the track as "prophetic." "There is a right and a wrong," he said. "This is not complicated, and this song is on the right side of history." He invoked the Arabic concept of ṣumūd, meaning steadfastness in the face of occupation and displacement.

Miari said she hopes that in ten years, listeners will "experience a free Palestine and look back at it as a testament about the truth and what happened, and just cherish that sense of resistance and urgency for freedom."

A familiar flashpoint in European culture

The release lands in a landscape where Waters has become one of the most polarising figures in European music. Berlin police investigated him in 2023 after he wore a Nazi-style uniform during a concert, a performance he described as "quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice and bigotry." In the UK, a High Court judge issued a preliminary ruling in February 2025 in a libel case brought by documentary producer John Ware, finding that comments Waters made about Ware were defamatory.

Waters has also been a long-standing supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, clashing publicly with Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and with Nick Cave over the issue. Last year he voiced support for Palestine Action after the UK government proscribed it as a terrorist organisation, calling the group "nonviolent" and "absolutely not terrorists in any way."

He has repeatedly rejected accusations of anti-Semitism. "I don't have an anti-Semitic bone in my body," he told WIRED. "I never did and I never will have." In 2023, Polly Samson, wife of former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour, called him "anti-Semitic to his rotten core," a description Gilmour endorsed as "demonstrably true." Waters called those remarks "incendiary and wildly inaccurate."

A widening cultural split

The release arrives days after Boy George shared 'We Will Dance Again', a pro-Israel reggae track that opens with the line "You say genocide, I say war," inspired by a visit to the Nova Festival Experience in London commemorating the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023.

Two veteran British musicians, two diametrically opposed songs, one week apart. For European audiences and the cultural institutions that host them, the Israel-Palestine conflict continues to force a public reckoning that shows little sign of settling.