Out of Gaza: New Palestinian poetry

At the beginning of the Fifth Gaza War, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer defiantly promised that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers’. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the building. Since the outbreak of the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ in October 2023, over 20k Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, almost all of them civilians. Four thousand children were killed in the first few weeks of the war. A third of all the houses have been destroyed, together with the water and electricity infrastructure, 300 schools, 26 hospitals and 88 mosques, turning Gaza into what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called a ‘graveyard’. Out of Gaza brings together responses to the current crisis by Palestinian poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Farid Bitar, Deema Shehabi, Hala Alyan, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. These are poems of rubble and resilience, death and resistance; they speak about displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Angry with the world’s silence in the face of such tragedy, these poems bear witness to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.