On October 7, 2023, Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada of Khan Yunis, an ancient city in southern Gaza, wrote in her journal that she drifted off to sleep the night before “thinking about very ordinary things”: shopping for some new clothes, an upcoming university exam, her future job prospects. But, as they have time and again in this war-ravaged twenty-five-mile stretch of coastal land wedged between Israel and the Mediterranean, the harrowing shriek of sirens, incoming missiles, and gunpowder blasts changed everything “in an instant.”
During the 2014 Gaza War—instigated, like the current conflict, by the kidnapping and killing of Israeli citizens by members of Gaza’s governing body, Hamas—Israel’s bombings were more or less strategic, observed Nada. In contrast, these recent attacks had no logic, she wrote. There was only chaos, catastrophe, “mass butchery [and the] senseless assassination of everything.”
Thirteen days later, Nada and her family were dead, killed in their home by an Israeli airstrike. She was thirty-two years old. In one of her final journal entries, she resolutely stated, “If we die...tell of us that we are a people with a rightful claim” to the land, known since Canaanite times (some five thousand years ago) as Gaza, meaning “strength.”
Nada’s journal entries are among nearly a hundred essays, dispatches, memoirs, interviews, poems, photographs, and works of art by Gazans featured in this compelling volume, profits from which go to charity organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. A collaborative effort, the book was jointly edited by Jerusalem-based writer and publisher Mahmoud Muna, UK journalist Matthew Teller (author of 2022’s Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of an Old City), Juliette Touma, Director of Communications for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Near Eastern Palestinian Refugees, and London-based journalist Jayyab Abusafia, a Gaza native.
Raw emotions infuse the pages of the book, featuring dozens of starkly intimate, firsthand reflections on the impact of war on innocent people. Much like Nada, thirty-five-year-old Gaza City resident Noor Swirki had what she considered a routine life prior to October 7. A married mother of two, she regularly took morning power walks along the Corniche before work and spent evenings with friends and family. Now, she writes, “We have no idea what will happen, if we will stay alive or not, or our loved ones will stay alive or not. So there is no daily routine.” Relocated several times since the war began, she offers plaintive insights into the unique challenges women face as refugees, including threats to personal safety and lack of privacy and access to hygiene products.
Forced by Israeli Defense Forces to vacate his home (like millions of his fellow Gazans), novelist Mahmoud Joudeh witnesses a lifetime’s worth of personal history—books, letters, family photos, as well as his life’s savings— “erased from the face of the earth” in the ten minutes he was given to leave his house.
Lacking the necessary funds to arrange safe passage across the border to Egypt, children’s-book author Beesan Nateel dejectedly wonders on Christmas Day 2023, “Who am I to think of surviving,” when all she held dear—her garden, her home, her beloved mother—lies buried beneath the rubble of Gaza City?
Yet in contrast to the “smoke and debris” caused by Israel’s merciless bombardments and, in Gazan writer Heba Almaqadma’s words, the shattered “glass, rocks and concrete” littering Gaza’s streets, the book testifies to Gaza’s rich and storied past, both ancient and modern, and its accounts “paint a picture that eviscerates media stereotypes of Gaza as a valueless slum.” A crossroad of commerce linking Egypt to Syria (and by extension the Mediterranean to China) since the second millennium BC, Gaza was the Fifth Avenue of the ancient world. Here, shoppers could browse for imported perfumes, silks, spices, linens, and glassware. Jewelry crafted from turquoise, lapis lazuli, and gold was its most famous luxury good, sold since medieval times in the Gold Market section of the Souq al-Qaysariyya (Arabic for “Caesar’s market”). The market was severely damaged by Israeli bombs on July 4, 2024.
But Gaza City’s richness transcends the transactional. Reflecting on its modern history, Joudeh describes a multilingual, cultured city with “more than ten universities...and dozens of cultural centres, libraries and theaters” lining streets “named after lovers, flowers and the sea.” The city has also long been a place of religious tolerance, where Muslims and Christians lived “side by side in friendship,” as Joudeh recalls. On Christmas Day, worshipers from both faiths traditionally gathered to listen to music in the twelfth-century Greek Orthodox church of St. Porphyrius, the oldest active church in the city. In classrooms, students from different faiths and different denominations learned together as well. Theologian Yousef AlKhouri—who descends from a long line of Greek Orthodox priests and whose name translates to “Joseph the Priest”—studied English at a Protestant institution while attending a Catholic school where as many as 90 percent of the students were Muslim. He also took classes in the Qur’an and Sharia law, courses “which helped me tremendously in my work as a theologian,” he writes.
Gaza’s religious architecture also speaks to the city’s plurality and its history of war, conquest, prosperity, and growth. Its oldest Muslim house of worship, the thirteenth-century Great Omari Mosque, was built on the ruins of a Crusader-era church (destroyed by the Muslim ruler Salah al-Din in 1187), which itself reportedly stood on the site of an ancient Philistine temple. Extensively damaged by British bombs during World War I, the mosque was restored, only to be obliterated during the same Israeli attack that damaged the neighboring Gold Market.
Certainly, annihilation and loss are recurring themes throughout Daybreak in Gaza, and many Gazans view the bombing of sites like the Great Omari mosque as part of Israel’s “long-standing pattern of cultural destruction throughout historic Palestine,” writes political anthropologist Caitlin Proctor, a member of a team of scholars documenting Gaza’s cultural sites before they disappear forever. Israel’s objective, Proctor observes, is simple: the elimination “of every aspect of a people and their identity from the land,” which ultimately paves the way for “settler colonialism.”
But a culture is not reduced to rubble as easily as a mosque or marketplace. That is the most important and powerful message of this book. Right now, Gaza as a place may appear unrecognizable and post-apocalyptic. Yet Gaza as a people lives on, so long as “whatever counted as normal and valuable and meaningful” is preserved, both on the record and in the minds and hearts of Gazans. As twenty-year-old Saba Timraz writes from Egypt, where she was forced to flee in April 2024, “I left Gaza, but it did not leave me.”
Daybreak in Gaza
Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture
Ed. by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia
Saqi Books
$19.10 | 336 pp.
