From beneath the dust and devastation, Gaza’s writers rise, not with weapons, but with pens sharpened by anguish. In the face of unspeakable violence and erasure, they assume the role of memory-keepers, documenting what the world refuses to see. Their words, forged under fire, carry the weight of lives lost, dreams destroyed, and a steadfast people whose voices refuse to be silenced.

As the genocide unfolded in Gaza, writing became an act of defiance. Letters turned into lifelines. Stories became shelters for truth. Writers like Saeed Abu Gaza chronicled daily life under bombardment, from shattered homes and mass funerals to the simplest moments of resilience, like waiting in line for bread. His collection, Love and Fear: Diaries of the Global War Against the Gaza Continent, stands as both testimony and resistance, literature born not in safety, but amid smoke, rubble, and mourning.

Poet Somaya Wadi, displaced and surrounded by hunger and loss, stitched together poetic fragments from her fractured days. Her words, shared online and later collected in Surviving Poems from the Algorithm, offered readers a glimpse into a reality stripped of comfort but rich in dignity. “Death writes for you,” she said. “Sorrow guides the pen.” For her, writing is no longer optional, it is a duty to document, to resist, and to endure.

In Gaza, writing is not the luxury of the safe. It is an act of survival in a place where authors are bombed alongside civilians, where electricity fades and hunger gnaws. Yet amid it all, writers persist, penning their stories by candlelight, in tents, or while queueing for water. They do not write from a distance; they write from within, their blood in the ink, their lives in the lines.

Their words carry far beyond the Strip. Translated, shared, and read across borders, they pierce through propaganda and indifference. They reclaim the Palestinian narrative from distortion and present it in its raw, human form: a mother’s last embrace, a child’s shattered toy, a prayer whispered beneath rubble. In doing so, they offer the world not just literature, but truth.

To write during war is to refuse oblivion. In Gaza, every sentence etched by a survivor is a resistance to silence, a rejection of erasure, and a promise: we were here, we suffered, we resisted, and we will be remembered.