Writing Gaza

Writing Gaza is an editorial initiative that supports writers and artists enduring genocide. Fire, blood, and rubble have emerged as documents of unspeakable violence unleashed against the Palestinians besieged in Gaza. The voices gathered here encourage us to construct an alternative political imagination. Moving across streets, dwelling in the pages of a diary, and rattling against windows, these voices carry the texture of their everyday life, of an ordinariness denied under occupation.

These are not only tender portraits of a city that refuses to be annihilated, they also crackle with questions addressed to a world that has allowed and normalised annihilation. Batool Abu Akleen, Haidar Al-Ghazali, Hamed Ashour, Marwan Nassar, and Shahd A. Alnaami produced these texts under duress: fighting long periods of hunger, mourning their loved ones killed by the occupation forces, nursing the sick and the wounded, displaced over and over again, arranging for tents. 

Appearing alongside each text are artworks by Gazan artists whose practice, in some cases, the writer is encountering for the first time. Against the occupation’s logic of fragmentation, we wish to place different voices in dialogue with each other. We hope that over the course of the initiative this dialogue will expand and these fragments will crystallise into a togetherness that seems difficult to envision at the moment. 

Throughout these texts, the murderous noise of drones is unmissable, but so is the writers’ insistence on the promise of life. Each contribution attests to immense pain, even as it embodies a refusal to be reduced to this pain; each word, each image, present a kernel of dignity and steadfastness amidst the debris of the hour.

Omar Berrada 
Shivangi Mariam Raj
29 September 2025
Paris / New York