Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide

Poet Abu Akleen (48Kg), novelist Nahil Mohana (No Men Allowed), creative writing teacher Ala’a Obaid (Writing Behind the Lines), and translator Sondos Sabra document their experience living through Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in this stunning collection of their diaries. Twenty-year-old Abu Akleen’s account begins on Jan. 10, 2025; her entries describe attempting to study for her exams as she and her family are displaced, living eight to a tent. In Sabra’s entries, her eight-year-old niece says, “I hope I die instantly so I don’t feel anything, and that no part of me gets amputated.... And you, Auntie, how do you want to die?” Mohana’s account, the collection’s longest, spans Oct. 7, 2023, to Mar. 20, 2025, and covers Mohana’s frequent displacement with her extended family and her 12-year-old daughter. Obaid offers an arresting account of pregnancy during bombardment, describing her desperate search for newborn clothes weeks before her due date and her stark experience delivering at an over-capacity hospital in Rafah. The four women’s descriptions of constant violence are vivid, and so too are their accounts of profound kindness and care: “There are no candles to blow out, but candles don’t matter. What matters is that we’re together,” Obaid writes, after struggling to find an egg to make a cake for her daughter. This bursts with life in the face of shocking horror. (Oct.)