Don't look left: a diary of genocide

On October 7, Israeli territory around the northeast border of Gaza Strip was invaded in a surprise attack by Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to over five months of wholesale genocide. Over 30,000 civilians have been killed, over a million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders who have all somehow managed to give it their complete backing.

Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated, not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by established media outlets and politicians.

One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif, whose diary entries have been occasionally serialised (with edits and framing) in places like The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza in early October 23 as a government minister and ended the year, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp.