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PREFACE
More than a year has passed since I finished this book, and although the world is discussing the ceasefire, it is far from being a reality while Israel is still bombing hospitals and their surroundings, even now. This has not been discussed much in the media. In point of fact the ceasefire has been violated several times by Israel, and Gazan victims number in the hundreds. The truth is there is no ceasefire to speak of.
Perhaps I can say that, in the time since compiling this book of testimonies, famine has been wielded as a weapon, claiming a large number of victims. The massacre did not stop with the events testified to in these pages; rather, they were followed by a new art form of murder. Along with murder by artificial intelligence Israel has instigated the weapon of starvation against the people of Gaza.
According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Health in Gaza on October 1, 2025, the confirmed number of deaths in the Strip through starvation and malnutrition has risen to 455, including 151 children. I did not record this new method of genocide against the Gazans in the testimonies; when the process of starving Gazans and using famine as a weapon of war began, I said to myself that perhaps it was a reverberation from other wars around the globe. But after following what is happening on the ground in Gaza daily and attentively, I have found that Israel used starvation and death from starvation as another form of systematic genocide. The pictures arriving in succession through the media and news agencies were appalling, and I would wonder to myself to what depths the moral shame of the human race will descend, when we stand thus, arms crossed, in front of children who are dying from hunger. Their figures were like moving skeletons, slowly dying every day in front of our eyes and the eyes of the entire world.
On October 23, 2025, the World Health Organization announced that “the situation in Gaza still remains catastrophic because what’s entering [Gaza] is not enough.” The organization has not recorded any improvement in hunger levels among Gazans, confirming that the nutritional and health situation has not changed despite the ceasefire, which of course has subsequently been violated by Israel.
The painful truth that persists in the details and grief of the people of Gaza is that forms of brutality have been diversifying and increasing, and the horrifying testimonies I gathered were only the beginning of a systematic process of murder. I was struck by something like numb shock when I realized that even the mechanism of destroying the hospitals was systematic. The wounded were murdered slowly, in the sense that the hospitals continued to be targeted with the aim of killing the greatest possible number of survivors, and after the ceasefire, hospitals such as al-Shifa were retargeted. We are confronted with the word “survivor” taking on new and paradoxical dimensions: whoever survived a bomb or missile cannot really be called a “survivor” because they remain in imminent danger. Wounded patients in the hospitals become perpetual targets of the Israeli killing machine.In truth, after all this time, I was hopeful that there would be a reduction in the killing and suffering of Gazans, a building of bridges of peace in the region, but another year has passed and still we are falling into the abyss. Perhaps there is a more important question for me as I continue my project of constructing humanity’s collective memory, and which relies on the theory that “the personal is political”: Was I right to record these testimonies?
Perhaps, to my crushing disappointment, for all these lives I collected, believing I would defend victims who resisted death and lost pieces of their bodies and lives—perhaps I have done nothing but add a black stain to human history. A stain of words . . . the words of the people of Gaza.