“Gaza Diary: Reading to Resist”

Author: Malak Hijazi | August 01 2025

When living through genocide, there are no reasons to wake up and start a new day. The days pass in monotony, and you waste your time waiting for the end, either your own or the end of it. But for me, books give meaning to a life made unlivable. Reading is what makes me welcome another morning, what pushes me to stand up, to move, and to find value in experience and in things. In Gaza, where Israel targets not only lives but libraries, reading itself becomes a form of resistance which is deeply rooted in the tradition of Palestinian intellectual life.

Israel bombed the main educational institutions in Gaza, including the university where I studied, in the very first days of the genocide. I didn’t think of it merely as the destruction of a place. It was where I had begun to form my habits and interests. I remembered my days in the university library and the first book I picked up: My Fair Lady. I can’t recall the plot or characters, but I still feel the spark of hope that leapt inside my heart as a fresh English language student eager to learn and work on myself. I also remembered the libraries that surrounded it and how much I loved being among them. The first thing I would do at the end of any semester was buy books. 

Finding Shelter

When Israel cut off the electricity and internet in the Gaza Strip, it was horrible to be disconnected from the world while hearing explosions every minute and receiving countless recorded warnings from the Israeli army ordering us to flee south or face the consequences. My family chose to stay. I wasn’t convinced by their decision. It felt like it was choosing death, but I couldn’t abandon them either.

As a survival mechanism, I decided to detach myself from the outside world by doing two things: first, not listening to the news on the radio; second, reading the books I had downloaded before the genocide. I started with The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, a book I had postponed for so long. I curled up in the corner of my bed with my laptop on my lap, hiding in the dark with the windows, curtains, and door shut to muffle the bombings. My sister would enter the room and say, “They bombed here, and they bombed there,” and I would beg her to let me read, immersed in words that spoke about how power structures, systems, and history have always been built by and for men, excluding women from decision-making.

My sister said I was out of context. But I didn’t think so. Genocide too is a man’s invention—initiated, funded, and executed by men through patriarchal and militarized systems. I wondered: if women had more power, would our world be less brutal?

Then I moved to another female writer, this time a Palestinian. I read Bread of Sacrifice by Samira Azzam, part of a short story collection. At that point, we were living on one small piece of bread a day. Flour had run out. My grandmother gave up her portion so we could eat. She said she wasn’t hungry, but I knew she was.

The story wasn’t about famine, but it spoke of sacrifice. It made me see my grandmother’s act as something larger than the systematic hunger imposed by Israel. I imagined us like freedom fighters, hungry but holding on to dignity. Azzam’s words helped me believe that our pain had meaning.

Shared Memory

After the brief ceasefire was breached in early December, my extended family fled Jabalia refugee camp and came to our home in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City. Suddenly, our house held 30 people. I had no privacy. I even hid my books so the children wouldn’t damage them. Just as I found a quiet moment, someone would knock on the door asking if I had seen someone, if I wanted food, if something was missing.

Then the tanks moved closer to our neighborhood. The refuge my relatives sought became another trap. During this time, I was reading Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry, a book Dr. Refaat Alareer  had recommended when I was his student. I didn’t know yet that he had been killed. We had no internet.

Amiry’s account of the Israeli invasion of Ramallah in 2002 felt eerily familiar. I laughed when she said she could forgive Ariel Sharon for invading Ramallah, but not for making her live with her mother-in-law. I was surrounded by relatives in every room. Her sense of humor, her ability to transform pain into irony, felt deeply Palestinian. I was moved when she described how her mother-in-law initially refused to leave her home, afraid she would never return—a trauma rooted in her expulsion from Jaffa. It reminded me of my father, who said, “I don’t want to lose my home in Gaza like my grandfather lost his home in Dayr Sunayd.”

That book helped me understand how we Palestinians are connected by memory, loss, and persistence, no matter where we live or how many decades separate us. It made me more aware of the fractures Israel tries to impose on our identity.

Bearing Witness

Lately, I’ve been reading Gaza Diaries by Muin Bseiso, and I truly don’t understand how this book wasn’t present in my life earlier. It speaks to a Gaza I’ve inherited but never fully seen. His words helped me understand that Gaza is not a curse, even if I’ve thought of it that way. In moments of extreme fear and exhaustion in the genocide, I have asked why, of all places on earth, I was born in this besieged strip. But through Bseiso’s testimony, I began to see Gaza as continuity. What we endure now is not separate from what our parents and grandparents lived through. It is part of a long-standing colonial project aimed explicitly at erasing Palestinians, and not something new or merely a result of an extreme Israeli party. 

Alongside Bseiso, I have also been reading The Diaries of Elena Mukhina, a Soviet teenager who lived through the siege of Leningrad. Like me, her life was turned upside down. She documented her hunger, the cold, and the death of those she loved. I share little with Elena in terms of geography or time, but I recognize the ordinariness of death, the daily rituals of fear and survival. I, too, see writing as a refuge, and a way to gather what is left of myself.

I have never abandoned the habit of reading during this genocide. Books have become a kind of safe architecture I can live inside. I gaze at a screen or the pages of a book, trying to ignore the red flash that comes before an explosion. Sometimes, I hear nothing at all because the sound of processing the story in my mind is louder than war. Reading helps me build a temporary world where I am not only a victim, but also a witness. When I read the words of those who tried to survive their own wars, I feel less alone. Their language becomes a bridge between us. Their words urge me to write and to document my own survival, so that someone, somewhere, might read me too and feel, if only for a moment, a little less alone.

About the Author: Malak Hijazi is a Palestinian writer based in Gaza. First published in The Institute For Palestine Studies