Young man documents Gaza’s untold stories of Israel’s genocide in book

A young, internally displaced man is writing a book to express the acute suffering of the Palestinians and share stories that otherwise wouldn’t be known. Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is continuing to cause unfathomable agony.

Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide, a book by Wasim Said, chronicles two years of unrelenting war and repeated forced displacement as a result of Israeli ground invasion, destruction, and forced starvation.

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The 24-year-old told Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud that he primarily writes inside a tent without any real protection from the scorching summer heat or the icy winter cold and heavy rains.

“Our lives have included displacement sites and tents,” he said. Even though it’s almost impossible, we have to find a way to cope with this suffering, he said.

Said’s book has chapters named after people, places, or memories he refuses to let go of.

He responded, “I don’t need your sympathy.” I require a human with a conscience that hasn’t rotted, a reader who won’t just sigh and then take their coffee, and so do I.

Because the Israeli military has nearly destroyed the entire infrastructure in Gaza, leaving the displaced population without electricity or internet, he has spent many nights writing in candlelight.

Said claimed that his intention was to express his emotions and bear witness to the atrocities rather than to be compensated.

“I was devastated,” My anger was impossible to contain. He claimed that writing was the only method for letting it out.

He initially wrote about his experiences, but he soon realized that many people had experienced even more heinous tragedies than the average person can imagine.

“People who were murdered and buried without the public’s knowledge.” Their final moments. their apprehension. The Untold Stories is the title of this chapter.

Every page serves as a quiet form of forgetting, according to Said. He claimed that in many situations death seemed “inevitable.”

“I wrote because I wanted to leave something behind, not just another martyr,” I wrote. If documents are not kept, stories vanish, he claimed.

The young man claimed to have questioned the purpose of writing or even the existence of being alive because there have been nearly 70, 000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since October 2023 and countless hospitals, schools, and homes that have been destroyed.

However, human nature seeks a glimmer of hope. I still think writing matters, he said, despite the images of starvation and death. I could write nothing more than this. The remainder is currently being written in blood. If I continue to live, I’ll finish the story.