I didn’t write this to make you cry.
Not for you to tell me: “Poor you.”
I write this so I can hang these words around your neck—
to make you bear the responsibility of my perspective,
the responsibility of knowing,
the responsibility of being a witness.

Unimaginable brutalities unfold within these brief pages, as a young man recounts the story of his world, obliterated. Twenty-two-year-old Wasim Said watched as his life was cast into constant danger when the Israeli occupation began its relentless and genocidal attacks on Gaza after October 7, 2023. In the short gasps between bombardments, Wasim picked up his pen to tell the stories of the atrocities he encountered at every turn: his family scrambling for food and shelter under gunfire, friends and neighbors brutally murdered as they tried to retrieve flour and false aid, the untold stories of those martyred at hospitals, schools, homes. 

The stories are difficult to stomach. They are graphic, they are cruel, they are unbearable—just as the Israeli occupation has been since its inception. But as Wasim constantly turns to address the reader, these stories also contain a charge within them. What will you do now that you have the responsibility of knowing? What will you do now that you are a witness just like him?

Wasim Said is a young Palestinian writer and physics student from Beit Hanoun, Gaza. He began writing during the war, documenting what he witnessed between bombardments, hunger, and repeated displacement. His book, Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza, was published in October 2025 by 1804 Books in collaboration with Liberated Texts and the People's Center for Palestine. He began writing to articulate what he saw and lived through between October 2023 and January 2025, when a ceasefire was announced. Wasim remains in Gaza and has organized fundraising efforts to support other displaced families.

ISBN: 979-8-9990195-1-6

Page count: 140 pages

Paperback