As Israel’s genocidal campaign expands across Gaza, now eleven months and counting, its people continue to document their plight, their struggle, their survival, and their death in many ways and through various platforms. Testimonies are chief among this documentation.
In continuing to review our own commitments at the Avery Review to questioning “what other forms (formats and traditions) of writing are required amidst genocide,” we here turn to the work of testimonies. As accounts of events, that, in their accumulation and repetition, both constitute the evidence and communicate the experience of genocide in Gaza, these testimonies are raw; they pierce through our grief. They demand that we engage directly with lived experience—that we look at and think about the devastation that goes uncaptured in the spaces between every word, breath, and letter. Gaza Story, a virtual platform and volunteer-based collective, has taken up the cause to gather any and all testimonies from the people of Gaza: from news sites, social media accounts, messaging platforms such as Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, and so on, in order to form an extensive aggregate of the voices of those who narrate the annihilation from the ground, in spite of efforts to muddle the truth.
In this edition of Gaza Pages, the Avery Review has collaborated with Gaza Story in translating seven such testimonies from a doctor, a child, a grandmother, a family, a neighbor, a municipal worker, and a prisoner; from Dr. Mahmoud Al-Sharafa, Nour Mattar, Tamam Musa Hamdan Al-Deiri, the Ayyad family, Subhi Ahmad Hussein, Ali Al-Fayyumi, and Hadeel Al Dahdouh—all gathered on a single page. They only begin to show the ways in which a genocide destroys every aspect of a city: its homes, mosques, streets, schools, hospitals, seafront, and then through its rubble, its networks of resilience and survival, its camps, its tents, and its bodies. These testimonies at times echo one another, attesting to the recurring and systemic execution of violence. And they also unleash the plurality of the scales, speeds, and extents at which this brutality is deployed.
Included alongside these testimonies from Gaza, are diary entries from Heba Al-Agha, collectively titled “Cartographies of Home,” which detail the same exhaustion, disorientation, fear, and horror expressed by her people in Gaza Story. We here amplify Heba’s daily writing practice as an additional method of testimony, meant to attune to Palestinians forcibly exiled, like her, by this ongoing genocide.
These pages are also accompanied by a running list of digitally-published ephemera collected and archived by the editors from social media platforms such as X and Instagram on the topic “Back to School.” Social media offers a temporal continuity that other forms of media are not so quick to replicate. This ephemera offers a way to testify on each other's behalf. And when archived and read together, beyond the feed, beyond the context of social media, they bear witness to and become evidence against genocide.
These testimonies are not easy to read: some include descriptions of bombing, wounds, torture, and death—direct accounts of genocide, incomprehensible and immeasurable in scope. As misinformation and silencing draws us away from the necessity of centering these voices and lived realities, we invite our readers to engage them here.
