About the book

On the morning of October 7, 2023, I was a medical student sitting with his family at the breakfast table, in our home in the Rimal district. Thirty-three days later, I was crossing the Rafah border into the unknown, looking back, not knowing when I would return. Between those two days… lies this book.

I am Ali Abu Nada, from a Palestinian family driven from the village of Dumra into the Gaza Strip in the Nakba of 1948 — the beginning of a story of displacement that continues to this day. I was born in Germany, but I grew up in Gaza; my roots stayed in its sand and in the alleys that shaped my awareness and my identity. We are four brothers: Ali, Omar, Yousef and Mohammed. Life settled us in northern Rimal — the neighbourhood of the Palestine Mosque — where I finished school with top marks, among the best in the country, and then began studying medicine at the Islamic University, following in the footsteps of my father, the physician.

The Gaza I write about is not the one from the news. Our Gaza was alive, brimming with detail: a sea whose moods we knew in every season; alleys that knew our names; mosques that gathered us at dawn; circles of friends that ended only to begin again. It was a besieged city, yes — but it insisted on life with a stubbornness that resembles its people. This is the Gaza you should know first, to grasp the scale of what happened to it.

Then came those days that were not ordinary. Thirty-three days of annihilation, lived from October 7 until we were forced out of the Strip. They were not passing events but a great rupture in the life of an entire city — and of our family in particular. My textbooks still stand on their shelf in a house that no longer stands, and the path I had begun there was redrawn by the war from its roots.

You will find no political analysis in this book, no figures and no statistics; you will find what my eyes saw, what my ears heard and what my heart lived through. This is not the whole story of the war — no book could hold it — but the story of a single family among hundreds of thousands. I write it as it was, without distortion and without exaggeration: a testimony for time, for the people, for those who are gone, and for those still beneath the rubble.

I will not claim that writing was easy. Some of these chapters I wrote and then closed the page for days, because memory sometimes burns like the smell of phosphorus that will not leave. But I kept returning — because forgetting is a betrayal of those who stayed behind.

To my steadfast father, holding his post in wounded Gaza, carrying the responsibility of medicine and humanity under the hardest of conditions — to him I write these words with pride and gratitude. And to my mother, my brothers, and everyone who was part of this journey.

And Gaza still lives in us, wherever we are… and the heart still holds what has not yet been said.

Translated from the Arabic. The original is authoritative: عن الكتاب