ISBN: 9781912697946
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Comma Press, 2024
Language: English
On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded in a surprise attack by Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly three months of wholesale genocide. Over 20,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders and mainstream media, who have all somehow managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians. Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians.
One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif’, whose diary entries have been occasionally serialised (with edits and framing) in places like The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp.
If we allow our understanding of world events to be corrupted and spun by lazy, compliant journalism, we will never understand them, even those happening in real-time, before our very eyes. These diaries give us a rare exit ramp from this state of ignorance.
Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Birzeit and a Master’s degree from the University of Bradford. He received a PhD in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of five novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000), The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003, 2006) and A Suspended Life (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF). He has also published two collections of short stories – Everything is Normal (2004) and Still Life: Stories from Gaza Time (2013) – as well as several books on politics. He is a regular contributor to a number of Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals. In 2014 Atef edited The Book of Gaza, as part of Comma’s ‘Reading the City’ series, which featured ten short stories by ten contemporary authors from the Strip. In 2015 Atef was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the ‘Arabic Man Booker’. In 2018 he also won the Katari Prize for Best Arabic Novel (young writers category). In 2015 he published his diaries of the 2014 war on Gaza: The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (Comma Press), which was described by Molly Crabapple as ‘a modern classic of war literature’. In 2019, he relocated to the West Bank and became Minister of Culture for the PA. At the start of Israel’s 2023 war on Gaza, Atef was visiting Gaza for a International Heritage Day event with his 15-year-old son, Yasser.
