Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza

“Read this book,” memoirist Thanh (To the Bridge) implores in her introduction to this nightmarish memoir of everyday life in Gaza. “Hassan Kanafani risked his life to write it.” Drawn from the author’s Reddit posts spanning from December 2024 to July 2025, the diary centers on life in the tent that engineering graduate Kanafani—a pseudonym—shares with his parents, grandmother, and siblings. His eyewitness reports include harrowing stories of neighbors pulling the bodies of their children from rubble, meager meals cooked over fires made of scraps of clothing, and performative acts of gratitude cruelly demanded by aid workers. “They are killing us—not only with bombs and bullets, but with hunger, with imprisonment, and with the relentless, brutal violation of our dignity,” he writes, as he recalls walking the camp at night and hearing the buzz of drones intermingling with the cries of starving children. (He also keeps track of skyrocketing food prices resulting from Israeli blockades; a bag of flour rises to more than $200, a single onion to $13.) “The truth about the war on Gaza is simple,” Kanafani explains after a so-called ceasefire during which Israel never stopped its attacks. “The occupation doesn’t want to stop the killing. It only wants to change its justifications.” This astonishing account demands readers look directly at the horrors in Gaza without blinking. (Apr.)