Written from within the genocide

Mike Phipps reviews Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide, by Wasim Said, published by 1804 Books.

In the poem that constitutes the Introduction to this powerful account of life in Gaza, Wasim Said explains that he began writing when the January 2025 ceasefire broke out, but “the moment I picked up the pen— The war returned.”

He says: “I write it so I can hang these words around your neck—

to make you bear the responsibility of my perspective,

the responsibility of knowing,

the responsibility of being a witness.”

A young man in his early twenties, Said began his chronicle as the genocide took place around him. His motivation: that what happened – and might happen to him – should not be erased.

On the evening of October 7th, Said’s family gathered on the ground floor of their building, “all thirty-six of us, my grandfather and everyone bearing his name. We sat in complete silence with the burning questions in our minds: Where can we go?” At that moment, Israeli planes bombed their neighbour’s house. The family set off, the children in two cars, the rest on foot.

They spent the night at al-Shifa Hospital. Next day he and his uncle set to work, carrying corpses from ambulances to the morgue. Most bodies could not be identified.

Two days later, they headed south in three vehicles. That night, they slept on the floor of a school, which quickly filled with displaced people. Their five-by-ten-metre classroom soon housed fifty-two people. When the school filled up, new arrivals took to the playground in ‘tents’ – loose home-made shelters that did not even keep out the rain. Sanitation quickly became a major concern.

“After the first month of the aggression, hunger became their most dangerous weapon. I had never imagined that a day would come when bread would be a treasure. I never thought that I would see the elderly splitting a small piece of bread among them, or children crying, not because they had lost a toy, but because starvation was tormenting them.”

In Deir al-Balah alone there were nearly a million people, but the town had only three bakeries. Within less than a month, one of them was flattened. “The lines were endless… I would leave at dawn, walk an hour to the bakery, then walk another half an hour to join the back of the queue. I stood there for long hours, until nightfall… At the bakery gate, there was no ‘queue’, just a battlefield.”

Said also describes the armed gangs who, with the support of the occupation, stole food from distribution trucks to sell on the black market, opening fire against any opposition.

An uncle recalls two tanks coming in, followed by food distribution trucks. The trucks unloaded their cargo of flour sacks and the tanks retreated. As people moved towards the flour, Israeli snipers opened fire. “The field was full of body parts.”

To avoid being used for Israeli target practice, other people the author spoke to ate animal feed and weeds.

Obtaining food and fuel to cook it was increasingly a life-threatening task. The author recalls his optimism during the ten-day ceasefire, which would quickly be dashed as the bombing resumed. But the emergence of communal soup kitchens became a lifeline and a symbol of collective resilience.

Said recounts almost random acts of destruction, senseless massacres – a tank deliberately crushing men who had been ordered by the Israelis to run and could not run fast enough, snipers killing children.

What comes through this memoir most strongly is a sense of anger and injustice – but also of unity, generosity and compassion amid the ceaseless bombardment. “If global action is not taken, we will be wiped out,” says Said. “We shall become a story, a fairy tale, a memory on the margins of history.”

At the time of writing, Wasid Said is still in Gaza. Another so-called ceasefire is in place. By mid-November, Israel had violated it 282 times and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. But the existence of this ceasefire pretence has given Germany the necessary cover to resume its arms exports to Israel, and France has reauthorised Israeli companies to exhibit at arms fairs. Meanwhile, Israel’s bombing of Lebanon intensifies.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.