Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

Aerial view of destruction in beach refugee camp, Gaza Strip (July 3, 2024) | Abedallah Alhaj / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume looks at the far-reaching impacts of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.       

Agriculture, education, medicine, journalism, infrastructure, wildlife: Chief among the book’s documentary achievements is its laying out of the breadth of the devastation wrought by the Israeli government and its (mostly) Western enablers. 

The collection offers startling insight into some of the horrific scenes captured in grainy photos, short video clips, and breaking news coverage of Gaza over the last two years.  “Unsafe Passage,” Mosab Abu Toha’s account of his time as an Israeli prisoner, for example, provides a closer look into the indiscriminate nature of Israeli detention policies, an issue that came to a head in December 2023, when images surfaced showing lines of near-naked Palestinian men who had been bound and blindfolded by Israeli soldiers. A noncombatant, Toha was summarily singled out and detained by the Israeli army for two days while he was attempting to flee to Egypt with his wife and three children. When he was finally released, Toha writes that one soldier told him, “We are sorry about the mistake,” as if his imprisonment and brutal treatment at the hands of the Israeli military were akin to a clerical error.

Gaza-based writer Noor Alyacoubi’s story of starvation provides a painful first-person perspective on the widely reported food shortage in Gaza. After months of dwindling food supplies brought on by Israel’s manufactured famine, Alyacoubi was eventually forced to wean her daughter when her body stopped producing milk. As Alyacoubi writes: “I had no choice—I was simply too depleted. I weaned her, and my heart broke, as though a part of our bond was severed, leaving me feeling as if I had somehow failed her.” 

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan’s testimony offers a similarly grounding account of healthcare providers’ struggles in the Gaza Strip. As a humanitarian physician with Doctors Without Borders, she compares the situation in Gaza to her previous work in other conflict areas. The differences, she notes, include the targeting of “civilians of all ages and genders,” Israel’s media blackout and aid restrictions, and the unprecedented rate at which the Israeli military has killed rescue workers and medical staff. Referring to the targeting of healthcare facilities, Haj-Hassan says, “This is not new; it has been documented with many previous aggressions on the Gaza Strip, but this time it has been so systematic that it has annihilated the healthcare sector.”

Other parts of the book marshal vast amounts of research and data, gathered over only two years, to offer a survey of Gaza’s devastation. Nina Lahkani’s “Ecocide in Palestine” tracks the large-scale environmental destruction caused by Israel’s assault. The statistics capture levels of decimation that are difficult to comprehend: By June 2024, for instance, “approximately 83 percent of all plant life and 70 percent of farmland had been destroyed in Gaza.” By September 2024, “Israel had bombed around four times the total number of buildings in Manhattan.” This destruction of vital infrastructure is part and parcel of what Lahkani identifies as Israel’s “decades-long apartheid regime, used to create intolerable, unlivable conditions and the expansion of illegal settlements across the occupied territories.” 

The poems Bhutto and Faleiro have included alongside these essays provide moments of poignant lyricism throughout the book. The refrain of “I grant you refuge” in Hiba Abu Naba’s poem, written only 10 days before she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023, lends the besieged speaker, trapped by conflict, some semblance of volition. Its closing lines—all too prescient—envision freedom from war in the afterlife:

“I grant you refuge in knowing / that the dust will clear, / and they who fell in love and died together / will one day laugh.”

Like Naba’s, Ahmed Masoud’s closing poem, “To Khalid,” also looks beyond the present as the speaker addresses a brother who has died: “As you busy yourself doing things for others / Like you have always done / Whatever you do, just stay there / I am coming, I won’t be long.” The final sentence is ambiguous: Has the speaker accepted a premature death as his ultimate fate? 

Since the book’s publication, several developments have occurred in the Gaza War, the most significant being the ceasefire that went into effect on October 10. As with any document written and compiled in medias res, readers will be able to place Gaza: The Story of a Genocide in a timeline based on what is and is not included in the book. Thousands more Palestinians were killed in the time since the final writings in the collection were completed.     

In her essay “On the Purposeful Killing of Storytellers and Truth Tellers,” Huda J. Fakhreddine opens with a description of a video from October 2024 in which Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif learns of the death of many of his family members while reading a report from a handheld device live on the air. “He rearranged the information on his screen,” she writes, “as if in the hope that a reordering of the phrases would change the reality, ‘One of the houses targeted belong [sic] to the al-Sharif family …’ Did his mind wander in the neighborhood for a second, trying to locate that house, thinking to himself, do I know which one?” 

“How many Palestinians in Gaza have been put on the cross like this,” Fakhreddine asks, “on the cross of unfathomable grief, enduring the horror of their immeasurable agony, as a spectacle for a hardened world to see?” What Fakhreddine didn’t know at the time of writing was that, in less than a year, al-Sharif would become yet another casualty in Israel’s war on journalists. The 28-year-old reporter was killed in August 2025 alongside several other colleagues in a targeted Israeli attack on a press tent in Gaza City.

Fakhreddine’s essay goes on to furnish readers with a litany of murdered journalists. You could almost call her listing tedious if it weren’t so chilling. All in all, she writes that Israel killed 130 journalists between October 2023 and November 2024, “one of the deadliest times for journalists in recent history.” That number has since risen to more than 270. 

Amid Israel’s assault on truth telling, a book like Gaza: The Story of a Genocide is all the more relevant. In its pages, Palestinians share their stories in their own words, and in their own genres. A face on a screen becomes a voice in your head.