NEW YORK — Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide, a witness statement by Gaza writer Wasim Said, is being published this month by independent company 1804 Books, which introduces his direct testimony with regards to Israel’s war on the besieged territory to readers writing and reading in English. Compiled from diaries he kept while shuttling back and forth in northern Gaza, the volume brings together urgent testimonies from families competing for food, shelter, and survival under bombardment, and will appear in bookstores on Sept. 17, 2025.
Billed as a brief but harrowing story, the paperback is listed on the 1804 Books online shop as 85 pages and priced at $16.95. His life thrown into constant peril, Said, who was 22 when the latest war began, witnesses — as he and others call Israel’s relentless, genocidal attacks on Gaza again intensified after Oct. 7, 2023.”
In short, tight chapters tightly written, Said tells how his family frantically sought food and shelter under gunfire, neighbors fell dead in pursuit of bags of flour or the mushroom clouds of aid, and worse: patients, medics, chaperones crushed in hospitals or schools or homes buried beneath rubble.
According to a project page from the Palestine Community organization, Said started writing Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide at a displacement tent after being expelled several times from his Beit Hanoun home, “while witnessing and recording starvation, a famine, and killings which repeatedly occur around him.”
He tells Al Jazeera English about writing, mostly on the floor of that tent, with no electricity or internet, sweltering through summers and freezing winter rains as bombardment and hunger persist. He claims he doesn’t need sympathy, but “a conscience that hasn’t rotted” and “to be a witness, not just another martyr.”
A foreword by the writer Mousa Alsadah — excerpted in Protean Magazine — places the book within a Palestinian tradition of testimony that stretches back far beyond Said’s pages, connecting them to Gaza Writes Back, a collection from late scholar Refaat Alareer, and to early vows made by Gazans not to allow themselves to be erased with their writing.
Alsadah notes that many accounts of genocide are written after the fact, but Said’s came to life under the drone, reigniting against the canvas walls when an airstrike shook through them — a record of “writing within death” rather than remembering from away.
The path from notebook to bookstore was anything but direct. A recent episode of the Acid Horizon podcast includes a reading from a text Said sent from Gaza and an interview with the editor, Louis Allday of Liberated Texts, which helped address the logistical and safety hurdles involved in getting his manuscript to the publisher, 1804 Books.
Early readers have read the book as literature and as evidence at once. A review in Middle East Eye calls it an insider account of the madness and bloodshed wrought by Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, written by a young man who has endured two years of bombardment and dispossession.
The Palestine Community project has also created a readers’ guide inviting community groups, organizers, and educators to read testimony together — as a commitment “to bear witness,” again and again and in perpetuity, so that mourning leads to conviction and politics.
Said’s work also becomes part of a mounting archive of Gaza testimonies that dates back considerably further than the war’s timeframe. A 2020 feature by Defense for Children International – Palestine collates testimonies from youth who lived through the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, reflecting on nights of constant artillery fire, wiped out families, and the enduring psychological impact of growing up under siege.
Previously, a 2010 report by Human Rights Watch titled “I Lost Everything” detailed how Israeli forces destroyed homes, factories, and farmland during the 2008–9 Cast Lead offensive, long after hostilities had ceased, and thousands of Palestinians were left stranded in tent camps, while borders were tightly restricted and reconstruction work was reduced to a trickle.
An Amnesty International investigation called “Black Friday,” into the Rafah offensive of 2015, used satellite imagery, video, and eyewitness accounts to accuse Israel of launching huge air and ground attacks after an Israeli soldier was captured that may have constituted war crimes — and possibly crimes against humanity.
There has also been testimony from within the Israeli military. A 2009 American Prospect story told the experience of Breaking the Silence, a veterans’ group whose soldiers detailed orders from the 2008–09 Gaza war that amounted to “shoot first” policies and widespread destruction far more than official briefings would concede.
United Nations investigations into the 2014 Gaza conflict also found evidence of serious violations of international humanitarian law by both Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups, but Israel rejected the findings as biased and politically motivated.
Israeli officials contend that actions in Gaza are directed at Hamas and other armed groups and that the army operates according to the laws of war, rejecting claims of genocide or deliberately targeting civilians.
In that context, Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide is unique in being written — not after the fact — but within a still-ongoing disaster. As Said writes in the book’s opening pages, “I did not write this to make you cry;” he intends rather to lay “the responsibility of knowing” upon his readers, asking them to take on the roles of witness — themselves witnesses and deciders about what they are going to do with that burden.
