Interview conducted by Muriel Steinmetz for L’Humanité, October 21st, 2025
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian novelist and journalist. A left-wing opponent of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, she has been threatened with death multiple times, forced into exile in 2011 with her daughter, and pursued by intelligence services. She returned clandestinely to Syria in 2012 and 2013, came back again, then left after the fall of the dictator. She is publishing Une mémoire de l’anéantissement (Stock).
In it, she recounts the testimonies of 26 survivors from Gaza, evacuated to Qatar to receive medical care. These are first-person accounts spoken by men, women, and children with diverse social backgrounds. All lived under bombardment for more than two years. They endured the worst.
Survivors of the genocide, they are those we hear little about, though they have so much to say. They speak of drones, uranium bombs used alongside famine, piles of bodies, cats and dogs devouring corpses, and the wounds of the injured crawling with worms. They speak of six-year-old children whose hair turned white overnight.
You are giving a voice to Gazans. Even though we have seen images of the atrocities they suffer, these direct testimonies are exceptional.
This book is part of my project involving collective memory. Since Crossfire. Journal of the Syrian Revolution (2012), The Crossing (2016), and 19 Women: Syrian Women Tell Their Stories (2019), I have been giving a platform to victims. Daily life, personal and intimate, is profoundly political. I recount how individuals so terribly wounded have lived through hell. Showing part of their suffering is the duty of journalists, intellectuals, writers, and activists: confronting horror with their own weapon, words.
Under what circumstances did these interviews take place?
I was in Qatar for personal reasons: my daughter, who works there, had a serious accident. I went from France to be at her bedside. While there, I discovered by chance survivors from Gaza receiving treatment at the Thumama medical complex. Most were amputees, burned, gravely injured. There were about three thousand of them, with their families. I introduced myself as a volunteer to the women. The first person I saw was a child in a wheelchair, amputated of both arms and both legs. I had spent years documenting the war in Syria and had been traumatized by it. At that moment, something had to be done. In the media, there were only political slogans. I decided to stay with them for months in 2024, to document their suffering and make their voices heard. It had not been planned. I was finishing a novel. I was preparing to go to Sudan to work with women who had been raped.
What questions did you ask?
I asked each of them two questions: What happened to you on 7 October? How did you lose a part of your body? I focused on their lives. One woman was cooking when she lost her daughter. A man was walking to school with his son when planes bombed his building.
Who are these men and women?
They are schoolteachers, housewives, students, journalists, nurses, business owners. There are many mothers, many teenagers. Abdallah, the youngest witness, is 13 years old. His face has been completely burned. His body is covered with shrapnel fragments. He saw his entire family burn before his eyes. The first two witnesses in the book are husband and wife. Their only son was killed in a bombing. One of his sisters lost her leg when the house collapsed. Another died, and that girl’s twin sister was burned and disfigured.
The impression we get from reading is of a monstrous trauma shared by all.
I share their suffering. If Abdallah saw his mother burn alive before his eyes, who knows if tomorrow we will not be targeted too. Human history is the history of savagery. People like us must fight for justice, which is something very profound. Silence, avoiding the truth, is unacceptable. I did not sense any desire for vengeance among these people. I have no confidence in an international political system that does nothing. They say the war is over. That is completely false.
How did the novelist in you approach these cries of pain far from any fiction?
When the revolution began in Syria in 2011, I would never have believed that I would one day document the horror of our current humanity. Never. This project transformed my life. The novelist in me has been exiled, cut off from the ability to invent fiction. It became impossible, through literature, to evoke the horror of the present, the rapes, the bombings, and the massacres in Syria. So I began this project on collective memory.
Your book stands out for its stark frankness, while most accounts restrict themselves to general reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This situation has lasted for nearly seventy years. We must create a new narrative, very different from what we are used to. In my view, a human life, with its personal details, reveals far more and says much more than political discourse. We must work with this kind of narrative. It is more useful, stronger, and deeper than the dry words of the media. Over time, Palestinians have been dehumanized.
There is a recurring pattern in the accounts. This repetition underscores the intentional nature of certain acts and confirms the systematic genocidal operation being implemented.
The recurrence of the testimonies is part of my method. A massacre is thus viewed from several angles. For the one that took place at Al-Shifa Hospital, I gave the floor to two women and to a doctor. Each has their own way of speaking, of highlighting certain details, of recounting what they lived. It is like a puzzle in which each piece eventually fits together. Once the book is read, readers will know what really happened in that hospital complex, the most important in the Gaza Strip. They killed patients, besieged the site, cut off water and food, bombed the building, destroyed the maternity unit, the incubators. An Israeli soldier pretended to rape a young amputee man. He shook his bed suggestively while saying: “I am screwing you.”
All say that the heinous acts committed by Israel are not linked to Hamas’ attacks.
That is what they repeated most often. They told me: “We are peaceful and they attack us. They killed babies, pregnant women.”
Some mention the terrifying novelty of the weapons: poisoned bombs, but especially the use of drones.
I have been a journalist for thirty-seven years. I have worked in Syria, in the Middle East. I was on the front line in Syria. I interviewed radical Islamist leaders. I lived under bombardments. I saw massacres. I wrote about prisons and rapes. Yet I have never documented such a way of killing people. I think of Shima, 21 years old. She told me about her father’s death. It must be known that killer robots live among the people of Gaza. They are called “zannana” because of the buzzing sound they emit. They are drones. Her father was targeted by this type of quadcopter that can shoot and self-explode. It entered a room, passed through two others like a small metallic butterfly to kill her father, then exited again through a window. This is science fiction, absolute savagery. It is a new war, waged by artificial intelligence.
What do you think of the ongoing negotiations about the future of Gaza and, more broadly, Palestine?
I prefer to say nothing. I have lost hope, yet I cannot admit it. There are no words to describe the situation.
Where do you live now?
I do not know. I fly with the wind. I travel a lot. I am between France, Lebanon, and Qatar.
