June 2025. We are now almost twenty-one months into the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza. Whole families wiped out, entire neighborhoods laid waste. Schools and universities and places of worship obliterated. Hospitals and healthcare facilities systematically destroyed. Journalists targeted and slaughtered, humanitarian workers executed. Patients burned to death in their hospital beds, displaced people in their tents. More than 92 percent of homes in Gaza damaged or destroyed. Water facilities and agricultural fields, generators and solar panels, bakeries and fishing boats and mills—any and all means of life, large and small—decimated.
Every time we think the horror has reached its apex, Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank expands with devastating impunity, metastasizes, mutates. Since March 2, 2025, Israel has imposed a full blockade on the people of Gaza, preventing the entry of all food, fuel, medicine, and other forms of aid. The very people who have survived all the horrors of the past twenty-one months, and who continue to endure relentless bombardment, are being starved to death. The fuel blockade means that water supplies have also reached critically low levels: not only famine, but also drought, is being engineered in Gaza.
Hunger and thirst. And now, mass killings at aid sites. In late May, a controversial Israel-approved and US-backed entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing minimal food aid at specific sites within Gaza. Since then, over 400 Palestinians have been being massacred while seeking aid: even desperately-needed aid has become a “death trap.”
What is left of Gaza, after all this? In the first piece offered in this edition of the Gaza Pages—a poem by the writer Nasser Rabah—rain arrives one night, an unexpected guest. The poet chides the rain for visiting this place of devastation, where little is left of the living land that once was: “Rain, why have you come tonight?” he asks. “Return to the sky.”
And yet Rabah himself knows all too well how much is left. His poetry is possessed of so much beauty and aliveness, a tender attention to the details of life’s unfolding, even as his world is being brutally and systematically destroyed. “Everything is alive in these pages,” writes Ben Ehrenreich in his review of Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, Rabah’s first poetry collection in English translation. “Clouds, trees, rivers, clothes, darkness, dreams, the night, language certainly, and poems without doubt.”
This edition of the Gaza Pages is dedicated to life and the living; to writing as witness, writing as insistence. As two million Palestinian people in Gaza continue to fight for life, to create and save what they can every day, to raise their children and take care of their loved ones, to find ways to go on, the writers of Gaza have continued to write. In the second piece of this edition, writer and literary translator Alaa Alqaisi, herself from Gaza, reviews four books authored by fellow Palestinian writers in Gaza and published in English this spring/summer. The third piece is an interview with the poet and journalist Husam Maarouf, founder of Gaza Publications—a publishing house created, incredibly, in the midst of the genocide.
“It isn’t true that there are ‘no words’ to describe life in Gaza during the genocide,” writes Kamila Shamsie in her review of Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide. “The words are here . . . read them.” Indeed, there are many words—the literary output of Gaza’s writers continues to be rich, abundant, and electrically alive. As Alaa Alqaisi writes in her book review for the Gaza Pages, “It confronts the reader with what survival actually demands: an ethics not of endurance but of presence in the unbearable.” This edition of the Gaza Pages is an offering to the Palestinian writers of Gaza, with gratitude to those whose work fills these pages. It is an invitation to readers to approach, in Alqaisi’s words, with “slowness, discomfort, attention . . . not to decode, but to accompany. Translation, in this context, becomes a form of shared fragility—a decision to carry the brokenness of language across a wound. There is no promise of restoration here, no literary scaffolding to rebuild what was lost. Instead, there is only witness, stubborn, cracked, unfinished.”