'We had to write as fast as Israel was killing people': The story behind Daybreak in Gaza

Made as an act of cultural preservation, new book brings together writings, illustrations and photographs from prominent and everyday people in the enclave

Palestinian fishermen boats at the sea port in Gaza. The photograph by Hazem Swidan is used as the cover image of the book Daybreak in Gaza. Alamy

When they set out to collect testimonies of people living through the war, the editors of Daybreak in Gaza knew they did not have the luxury of leisurely deliberation. The book was going to be unlike any other they had worked on and it had to be released as quickly as possible.

Palestinians in Gaza were being killed every day, as they still are, by Israeli bombardment. Daybreak in Gaza was conceived as a way of carrying their voices from the ground outward, through testimony and showing the lives at stake.

The urgency meant the project had to move with the same pace as the violence it wanted to confront.

“We were fast, because we had to write as fast as Israel has been killing people, literally,” says Mahmoud Muna, a bookseller from Jerusalem and one of the editors.

Daybreak in Gaza was released in October 2024, marking the one year anniversary of the war in Gaza. Photo: Saqi Books

And so, from March to May 2024, editors in London, Paris, Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem and Gaza gathered, transcribed and translated testimonies they had begun collecting in October 2023, working against faltering internet and phone connections, as well as the chilling knowledge that their contributors may not survive to see their words in print.

“We wanted to do something. We wanted to feel like we were doing something productive,” Muna says. “We believe in the power of literature. We believe in books. We're still under the delusion that this is, in some way, would help the killing to stop and for the bloodshed to stop.”

There was another impetus for the book: to elevate the Palestinian experience in Gaza from the flatness of statistical reporting. By highlighting individual voices, the editors sought to challenge the dehumanising narratives that continue to fuel the war.

“People are being dehumanised by the media,” Muna says. “Our belief is that if we shed some light, we humanise people – and I feel awful for saying that because people are human and they don’t need us to humanise them – but if we counter this dehumanising then we are making the case more and more for this to stop.”

Children of Beit Lahia, Gaza, 2019. One of the images featured in Daybreak in Gaza. Photo: Shareef Sarhan

Saqi Books understood the gravity of the situation and expedited the publishing process to bring Daybreak in Gaza to shelves within weeks – a time frame that is practically unheard of in the publishing world.

Sadly, by the time the book was released in October 2024, some of its contributors had been killed or have been unheard from since. Given the state of communications in Gaza, it remains difficult to confirm in some cases whether the authors have died or are simply unreachable.

“People were lost while we were interviewing them,” Muna says. “By the time the book came out, not everyone in the book was alive.”

Many were also killed in the months before the project began. Among them was Hiba Abu Nada, known for her award-winning novel Oxygen is not for the dead, who was killed in an air strike in October 2023, and Noor Aldeen Hajjaj, who died when Israeli planes bombarded dozens of residential buildings in Al-Shuja'iyya in December 2023. That same month, Refaat Alareer was also killed in an Israeli air strike along with his sister, brother, and four of his nephews and nieces.

These tragedies underscore the book's urgency. But even within its pages, this sense of writing against time is plain from the opening story.

“Hello, Ahmed from Gaza here,” Breaking News by Ahmed Mortaja begins. It is a deceptively simple introduction, but the sentence lays the groundwork for what Daybreak in Gaza stands for. The line addresses the reader directly, a confrontation, may-day and introduction all at once.

“And he’s introducing himself to an English speaking readership,” says co-editor Matthew Teller, author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem. “It is very personal, very direct and face-to-face. I'm saying hello to you, one-to-one from page one.”

The book features several photographs from UNRWA's archives, including this image of Najmeh Abu Haibeh, a teacher training graduate. Photo: UNRWA

After introducing himself, Mortaja offers a visceral description of daily life in Gaza, as well as his hopes, dreams and terrors. “I hate answers, and I love questions,” he writes, before sharing the fact he is “afraid that I will die and become a number, and that everything will be gone before I complete what I have to write”.

Breaking News is a poignant and powerful entry point into a collection that insists on the individuality of Gazans. The writing is varied and from a multitude of voices. There are teachers, artists, shopkeepers and farmers writing in prose, poetry and fragments of diaries.

Noor Swirki, a mother of two, writes about moving Gaza to Khan Yunis, and then from Khan Yunis to Rafah. “Being a displaced woman is a tragedy,” she reflects. “You don’t have your own privacy. You don’t have your own health routine.”

Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, a doctor for Medical Aid for Palestinians, writes about the children of Gaza flying colourful kites, despite the famine and danger.

“The message the children send can be very powerful, particularly when they choose the colours of the Palestinian flag – and flying a kite is in itself an act of resistance, breaking the air siege and reclaiming the Palestinian skies, succeeding where politicians and militants have failed.”

Daybreak in Gaza shines light on the history and significance of Tatreez. Photo: UNRWA

There are dozens of such testimonies and each of them illuminates the everyday resilience of Palestinians in Gaza. The accounts flicker between grief, defiance and humour. Together, they depict a Gaza that is bustling with classrooms, cafes, bookshops and families.

“It's about showing to the world the love of life, how much these people love life, and how determined are they to continue to be,” says the book’s co-editor Juliette Touma, who is director of communications for UNRWA.

“Gaza has been forcefully isolated for nearly two decades now. But from this womb of isolation comes out life and that is what Gaza is about. That’s what the world needs to know.”

Touma also notes that one of the many tragedies Gazans are now facing is their interrupted education. “It is their pride and joy,” she says.

One testimony that captures this is My Heart is Broken by Saba Timraz. The 21-year-old had been studying computer engineering at Gaza’s Islamic University when Israel began attacking the enclave in response to the Hamas-led offensive on Israel on October 7, 2023. The university was closed and partially destroyed. Timraz eventually fled to Egypt to escape the air strikes.

“She wrote this original essay for us,” Teller says. “She was trapped with her sister inside Gaza for 184 days at the beginning of the bombardment. She speaks with real fire and fury. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing. But she also speaks of education and what the displacement and what all the all the trauma has done to them and their education process.”

This photograph taken in Gaza between 1939 and 1940 features one of the Armenian families highlighted in the book. Photo: Levon Yotnakhparian

Interestingly, Daybreak in Gaza does not merely focus on testimonies from the current war. It shows the cyclical nature of Israel’s onslaught of Gaza. Journalist Mohammed Omer’s 2003 diaries, for instance, describes in unsettling detail how five members of a family were shot, one after the other, as they rushed to tend to the wounded.

The book also draws on writing by several renowned figures, including Mahmoud Darwish, Susan Abulhawa and Ghassan Kanafani. Alongside text, it features illustrations by Maisara Baroud, photographs from UNRWA’s archives documenting decades of education in Gaza, as well as portraits by Armenian photographers who rooted themselves in Gaza and chronicled its people and upheavals through the 20th century.

The images are bolstered by essays that excavate different pockets of Gaza’s history – from its early beginnings five thousand years ago when Egyptian travellers arrived under Narmer, the so-called Catfish King, to the region’s long traditions of weaving and embroidery.

“This is not a eulogy for the dead,” Teller says. “Specifically, it’s Daybreak in Gaza, the aspect of hope that almost everybody we spoke to emphasised was central. People refused to be seen as numbers, and they refused to be accepted as statistics. They were asserting their right to live.”

In this 1969 photo from UNRWA's archives, a group of Palestine girls play volleyball at the Women's Program Center in Jabalia Camp, Gaza. Photo: UNRWA

Ultimately, Daybreak in Gaza may not directly stop Israel’s war on Gaza but it ensures that the names, stories and lives of Palestinians survive the bloodshed. It may provoke enough empathy and understanding to bolster ceasefire efforts. For readers, the book is a way of understanding the depth of the Palestinian struggle, of refusing to understand the impact of the conflict through statistics.

Daybreak in Gaza will also directly help those in need as profits from the book are being donated to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Muna also encourages readers to seek out the authors behind the testimonies and connecting with them, in hopes that they are still alive. “I think this book is like the yellow pages, an index where you can find people you can relate to,” he says.

“Some people will relate to the young women. Some will relate to the theatre guy. Some will relate to the lawyer or the felafel shopkeeper. In that way, it creates these connections between people outside the world and Gaza.”