Description
The Gaza Strip was created by Israel as the world’s biggest refugee camp in the world during the Nakba of 1948. Within a year, an area known for its prosperity and diversity became a densely populated Strip first ruled by Egypt and then occupied by Israel in 1967.
From 2006 the biggest refugee camp in the world became the biggest open prison in the world. Israel imposed siege on the Gaza Strip after its people democratically elected Hamas, a government Israel did not like. The Strip was punished and put under land siege and sea blockade.
Any attempt by the people of Gaza to resist was met by the full force of the Israeli army. Israel has launched major wars on Gaza since 2008, bombarding it from the air, land and sea. The deadly Israeli attacks reached all urban and rural spaces of the Gaza Strip. These were not acts of retaliation, but reflected a policy of incremental genocide meant to wipe out the Gaza Strip entirely as part of the ethnic cleansing policies of Israel, fulfilling the logic of a settler colonial state to replace the native inhabitants.
In these four assaults, the Israeli army demolished schools, burned homes, targeted electric grids and water purification plants, in addition to bombing universities, hospitals, mosques, and lately, churches.
The latest assault on Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023 has been the most catastrophic by far. It has quickly morphed to become a full-blown genocide.
Unlike previous wars, which incrementally made Gaza, per United Nations estimates, ‘unlivable’, the latest war aimed at erasing the Gazan population completely. As of December 30, the Wall Street Journal reported that 70 percent of residential areas of Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, rendering nearly the entire population of the Strip homeless. It seemed as if Israel had decided to annihilate Gaza without using weapons of mass destruction, though such an ‘option’ was floated by Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu.
As a consequence, every hospital in the Strip has either been bombed, shelled, raided, or shut down. Every sector of Palestinian society has been targeted, and in some cases completely wrecked. Aside from the healthcare system, this ruin has also reached the educational system, food distribution centers, commercial hubs, police stations, civil defense headquarters, religious institutions, government offices, and even art galleries, libraries, museums, zoos, and animal shelters.
Though Israel wants, in the words of Israeli official Moshe Feiglin, to “completely destroy Gaza”, the small but proud and ever-steadfast region is unlikely to break, because the strength of Gaza emanates from its people, not its infrastructure.
But can Gaza recover from this? Can it be rebuilt? And why was it destroyed in the first place?
In this book, we explore the power of the Palestinian people of Gaza through the words of Gaza’s own intellectuals, journalists, doctors, teachers, civil defense workers, artists, political leaders, imams, priests, athletes, volunteers and the like, who speak about the war in the context of their own struggles within their respective fields, before and during the genocide.
Here, they provide their own vision of how to rebuild what has been destroyed, and how to convey a message to the world for the sake of building solidarity around Gaza for years to come.
Michael Leonardi, Palestine Chronicle –
The Western press still prefers a war with two sides, a “conflict” that can already be spoken in the past tense, a Gaza assigned in advance to some colonial Board of Peace. “Gaza Rising: Voices From the Rubble” refuses that narrative. It is not a book about Gazans composed from a distant office. It is a book written, as Louis Brehony notes in the opening praise, in flooded tents and demolished buildings, under total blockade, by people the occupation intended to leave without a voice.
Clarity Press published the volume in 2026. The Palestine Chronicle lives inside it. Ramzy Baroud, founding editor of The Palestine Chronicle and one of the book’s three editors, opens with an argument he has made for years, and that the genocide after October 7 stripped of every remaining pretense. The genocide, he writes in the introduction, “Gaza Rising: Revolutionary Love in the Shadow of Genocide,” was not a war that got out of hand. It was conceived as elimination. Incremental slaughter — the “diet” Dov Weissglas named, the calorie charts leaked to Haaretz, the Israeli military idiom of “mowing the grass,” the Great March of Return answered with snipers — was the long method. After October 7 the method dropped its smokescreen. Ilan Pappé’s preface puts the same fact in the language of settler colonialism. Dehumanization, he writes, is denial twice over: first the crime, then the erasure of the crime. Gaza, some seventy percent of its people refugees of 1948, was the laboratory. The inferno was not revenge. It was an attempt to finish what 1948 left unfinished.
That frame matters because the book’s force is not only the editors’ essays, strong as they are. It is that the editors step aside. The middle of the book belongs to Gazans who wrote while the killing was still arriving by the hour, in fragments, whenever electricity or a signal allowed.
Romana Rubeo’s chapter, “‘This Generation Will Not Leave Gaza’: Diaries of a Fallen Journalist,” is the hinge. Rubeo, managing editor of the Palestine Chronicle, records that Baroud woke her in the night of October 7. What follows is not memoir as brand. It is the record of a news outlet watching its contributors vanish. A young writer who had sat, weeks earlier, in an online seminar on love and death is martyred with his family in the north. A photojournalist who had sent pictures of weddings and pizza shops goes silent, reappears injured, and is pulled out of Gaza; the photographs stop. Wafa Aludaini, the journalist to whom Rubeo dedicates her share of the book, does not return the blue ticks on WhatsApp. Rubeo learns of her death on Facebook: Allah yerhamha. Then there is the correspondent the book calls A.A., who never asked for money, who sent “All my love” between massacres, and who insisted, in a dispatch dated October 18, 2023, that this was not two armies in a conventional war but an occupying force against a people seeking liberation. By the thirteenth day, he wrote, the phrase in Gaza was no longer that a family had lost members. People said: no one remained. His last silence comes in June 2024. Rubeo’s chapter is what the targeting of the press looks like from the inbox. Israel refused the entry of international journalists. Gazans became the eyes and ears on the ground and reported courageously — until so many of them were killed that most of the messages simply stopped.
Soma Baroud’s “The Last Photograph” is the book’s moral center and its wound. She is Ramzy Baroud’s sister, an obstetrician-gynecologist who had the option of leaving and did not. The piece is assembled from WhatsApp lines she never lived to approve; her brother says so, and asks her forgiveness. She writes why she came back to Gaza and why she would not leave again. An Israeli drone hits her car on the road from the hospital in October 2024. The timeline at the back of the book records her as the 166th doctor killed in the genocide. Haim Bresheeth, in the praise pages, calls the volume a fitting memorial. It is also an indictment of a war on healing itself: kill the doctor so the wounded cannot be made whole.
The other voices refuse the single register of victimhood that Western pity requires. Abu Kan’an, in “Gaza’s Beautiful Mornings,” writes the everyday and the long DNA of a resistance that cannot be reduced to one faction. Hani El Salmy, in “On Why ‘The Soldiers Don’t Like Books,’” uses humor as Baroud describes it in the introduction — an expression of power against the death machine. Rasheed Anbar, in “Animals in Gaza,” will not abandon the other lives under the bombs. Munia Jamal, in “Guilt Like None Other,” carries the particular suffering of having gotten out while family remained. Shaimaa Eid, in “Love in the Time of Genocide,” becomes the journalist the siege created when international reporters were refused entry. Maphaz Ahmad Yousef, in “That Familiar Word,” insists on the right to report and to accuse from outside the Strip. Asia al-Masouabi, in “If Only I Had Wings,” writes the stubborn impulse for life among graveyards of houses and careers. Lamia Othman looks at children of martyrs and orphans and still speaks of a school of resilience. Richard Falk’s afterword, “On the Eloquence of Experience,” names what the collection is: Palestinian testimony against a genocide the official world still attempts to diminish. Ahmet Davutoğlu’s coda, “What Gaza Has Taught Us,” asks what those who watched and did not stop it are prepared to learn.
Baroud is direct about the book’s original plan. Early in the slaughter the editors imagined a volume on how to rebuild what Israel had destroyed. Contributors were killed, wounded, disappeared, or forced out. They kept the title anyway. “Rising,” he writes, no longer means reconstruction first. It means the ascendance of a spirit the occupation could not destroy with famine or drones. The Che Guevara line that sits at the head of the introduction is not decoration: “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” In this book love is not a soft landing. It is the decision to stay, to write while the battery dies, to nurse until the car is hit, to send affection between bakery bombings.
This is evidence, not therapy. It answers the questions the “day after” conferences exclude Palestinians from asking. Why do they refuse to leave? Where does the collective power come from? Why will the occupation not obtain the submission it has spent seventy-eight years demanding? The answers, as Pappé and Baroud both insist, are not mystical. They are family, faith, the word, and the refusal to let the occupier narrate the dead. Antonio Gramsci’s formula — pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will — is, in Baroud’s account, Gaza’s daily resistance. Sumud here is not a slogan. It is a strategy: remain, live, dream of a future, even when the map is a cartography of disaster.
There are limits a reviewer should name, and the editors do not hide them. Some contributors appear under initials because the killing is not over. The book cannot be complete; completeness would mean the genocide had stopped long enough for ordinary revision. Soma Baroud’s chapter is unfinished by murder. A.A.’s diary ends in a blank. That incompleteness is part of the document. So is the fact that a press which spent two years calling this a war of “self-defense” will treat Gaza Rising: Voices from the Rubble as a partisan object. It is partisan. It takes the side of the people under the rubble and of the people who kept typing from it.
Read it next to the news of the ongoing destruction of Gaza during Trump’s farcical ceasefire, to the U.S. and British terror listings aimed at Palestinian solidarity, to the sanctioning of Francesca Albanese, to the Italian bill that would write the IHRA definition into law, to the official Israeli practice of calling occupied land Judea and Samaria. Those are strategies for making this testimony unsayable. The book exists to keep it sayable. The genocide in Gaza is not a past-tense reality. This week a six-storey building in Tal al-Hawa, already cracked by earlier Israeli strikes, collapsed on families who had nowhere else to sleep. Civil defense recovered twenty-one dead, twelve of them children. As of this writing, up to fifty children were still reported under the rubble of that building. The voices in this collection — Soma’s, A.A.’s, Wafa’s, and those who lived to finish their pages — are still rising. That is not a metaphor the occupation gets to dismiss. It is the record the occupation tried to end, and failed. Gaza Rising: Voices from the Rubble will remain a lasting, living and powerful testament to these horrific times.” Michael Leonardi Palestine Chronicle