by Catherine Coquio for ‘En attendant Nadeau’, November 4th, 2025

After the daily stupefaction caused by the news and the images in the media, after the battles over words, the off-the-cuff analyses and the sample of prescriptive maneuvers that have occupied and undermined public speech, the first historical approaches to what has been taking place in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7 finally arrive, as do reflections on the world that made this possible, that watches or takes part, and that will survive it. The voices of those concerned, though slow to be heard, are beginning to emerge, bringing faces and names into view. Alongside the poetic writings coming from Palestine and its diaspora, books are now being published that contain testimonies and texts from survivors of the ongoing extermination — materials that, until now, could only be read sporadically, most often thanks to social media and activist organizations. We apprehended these stories. We were right to. Where we had heard talk of bombings, displacements, hospital evacuations, these stories make us grasp from the inside the realities experienced, and we tremble.

“Everything is red! Everything is red!” is the cry repeated by Mohamad Ayyash, five years old, when he is found standing after an explosion made him “fly through the air” and land on a neighboring building in the Jabaliya camp. That same day, October 10, 2023, his mother Nada also “flew away” when two sheft missiles blew up the building where her family lived, near the UNRWA school where she had taught, killing twenty-five members of her extended family, from the newborn to the grandmother holding him.

She found herself buried under the rubble, and—unable to speak because she believed she was dead—she pushed her hand toward those who were shouting as they dug through the stones with their fingers: they then saw hers protruding. Once extracted from the debris, the “memory of her mouth” returned, and she screamed as she felt the pain (“as if I were being flayed from head to toe”): her legs had been crushed. At the Indonesian hospital, filled with wounded and displaced people, she found her daughter, screaming, her foot impaled on a metal rod.

It is the mother who tells the story. On October 12 they flee another drone-announced bombing: she in a wheelchair, her injured daughter and the infirm grandfather, and they end up in the Nousseirat camp with other displaced people, crammed into a room without toilets—a place the little Mohamad, who says he is “not happy,” calls the “house of devils.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli army mounts a ground assault on Jabaliya, where her husband tries in vain to gather and bury the pieces of their loved ones. The missile hunt drives them to Rafah, where, more than fifty of them packed into an apartment, they survive ten days drinking stagnant water. What they see in the streets—where a stench, made worse by their own bodies, reigns—is a “nightmare”: sick people, amputees wandering among dismembered corpses mixed with waste: “the dead and the living were side by side.”

The family moves five times in four months—“they chased us from one place, then came from the air to finish off the wounded and those who had survived the carnage”—before being evacuated to Qatar for urgent treatment. Haunted by these scenes, the mother is even more haunted by the faces of loved ones suffocating beneath the stones: “the children, the young people, the old. They were good people, beautiful people, who loved life despite its hardness. […] Now I must start from scratch, from below even, to rebuild a life I know nothing about. What I know is that I must go on for my children.” Because, thank God, her children are alive.

But Mohamad keeps repeating “Everything is red!”, and his hair is all white. She speaks of the “strange effects” of missile poisons inside her body: vaginal hemorrhaging (“something was detaching inside me”), generalized inflammation, cessation of her menstrual cycle. Even “stranger,” she says, is the fact that “often physical pain covers over that of the soul.” She often thinks of her child’s white hair and his words “not happy.”

This is one of 26 testimonies from Gazans of all ages that the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek collected at the Thumama health complex in Doha, the city where her daughter lives. She spent six months there in spring and summer 2024 listening to survivors’ stories—among the 2,500 who had taken refuge there because of their injuries—and asked them: what happened to you since October 7? They are mutilated, amputated, burned, and the youngest has lost his face. Yet each wants to speak, says he has seen so many things that “defy understanding” and are “pure madness” that he cannot say it all, and yet each wants to be heard. “Please, write down every word,” says Bouchra al-Galban, a former English teacher, and some ask that the names of all the missing be listed at the end of the story.

Each of them is missing a piece of their body, but the loss reaches the totality of what they had and were: their family—some are the sole survivors—their home, their country, their plans. They look at their “first life” with a nostalgia fed by an appetite for living whose ardor sometimes pierces through the bitterness. Nostalgia for the joys and hopes of before—those that parents and children mainly had pinned on education and study, cultivated values and chances for a future. Violent nostalgia for Gaza, that cursed world that one continues to love while crying for its streets and shattered dreams.

Mohannad, fifteen, displaced seven times (“We were nothing but simple things in motion”), keeps replaying the image of his paintings and brushes burning in his room, because he had planned to become an artist (“I’m not well and I’m sad”). A heartbreaking story. But they all are. Some are more harrowing than others, when the accumulation of suffering reaches zones of unimaginable atrocity, and imagining the unleashed murderous orgy saturates the mental space, echoing the state of shock that the speaker continues to live through, oscillating between a verbal hemorrhage and the need to be silent.

The severing

All of them, in body and language, undergo what Samar Yazbek calls the law of severing. The Arabic word is al-tamazzok, ordinarily translated as tearing. But to the act of cutting is added that of making disappear. A memory of annihilation paints the portrait of a humanity torn apart, amputated, eviscerated, showing the lives of humans severed from the world, the shredding of bodies destroyed by fire, metal and stone, that of the living but also of the dead, who must be killed several times (“They even bombed the corpses to tear them apart”), and that of consciences at the heart of collective annihilation. The dispossession engendered by the crime of genocide—essentially “without reason” behind its politico-economic calculations, here territorial and real estate—prompted the late Philippe Bouchereau to speak of a “Great Severing”.

This is precisely what is at issue here. The people who speak, whatever their age, know war and have lived through several. The oldest evoke the First Intifada, 2008 and 2012, to say that it was always different, and that they realized it from the first “belts of fire” in October. (“We knew from the beginning that they wanted to exterminate all the inhabitants of Gaza. Every living creature was considered a target to annihilate. From the first day, they exceeded all limits.”)

This time, they all say, it is not a war. Pronouncing even the word “genocide” would not be sufficient, one of them says. One must not see here, nor in the frequent image of the end of the world, an hyperbole inherent to survivors’ narratives. For it is indeed an apocalypse that was intended and programmed by the sponsors of these acts. The response to the massacre committed by Hamas had been announced by Netanyahu in figurative but clear terms: “the region will change physiognomy and they will remember it for generations.”

What Gazans have lived through confirms the immediate radicality of this program, and reduces to nothing the discourse that frames it as a legitimate retaliatory war that got out of hand and can no longer be justified: that belated turn does exist, but in the awakened conscience of those, Jewish and non-Jewish, who, seeing where the Trump-Netanyahu alliance was leading and taking note of the persistence of the unjustifiable, began to feel a discomfort with the media framing that imposed itself in France, with its suite of evasions, euphemisms and injunctions to silence in a stunning portion of the world of culture, publishing and the university—but that is another, also appalling story.

In an era of techno-fascism, moreover, genocidal destruction is sui generis. The art of killing has equipped itself with high technology never before used with such systematic intent over an area so small and so densely populated. AI perfects extermination, making targeting as precise as it is relentless. Everyone experiences this in their flesh and soul. Each person knows they are identified and tries to understand the political law of warnings and targeting, in vain: not only civilians but the weakest, and those who help them, are clearly targeted. Inhumanity and cruelty complement each other.

That is also the price of this book: through an atrocious miserere, it gives the keys to the modus operandi of this cutting-edge annihilation, and describes from within the engineering that strikes this genocide with the stamp of inhumanity squared: devastating missiles, weapons that poison and tear flesh, producing “strange wounds,” quadcopter drones (the “zananna”) that both surveil, identify and kill, spreading an unknown terror in homes (“We were besieged even in the air we breathed with these flying machines of death that were all around us”); added to this is the slow assassination by preventing drinking and eating, healing and being healed after the destruction of hospitals and the murder of doctors or their torture in prison.

The result is the hunt of a people turned into human game, for whom no possibility can open a present that cages them as much as space does, every refuge becoming a trap. In Gaza one must flee constantly, but there is nowhere to flee. All must disappear.

All this is understood directly through the narration of facts by people not engaged in political action, as shown immediately by their terrified surprise on realizing that the rocket barrages came from Hamas. The phrase the author claims—feminist and ardent reader of bell hooks—“the personal is political,” often heard, finds here an implacable pertinence. “What sense is there in continuing to speak of them by political and ideological slogans while remaining so distant from their intimate pains?” she asks.

Samar Yazbek says she wants “to investigate this act of severing of humans and stones,” to make it speakable and transform it into a “narrative object,” and thereby prevent lives from being destroyed a second time by ignorance and forgetting. Contributing to that “reconstruction” is to help survivors do with language what they desperately tried to do in gathering the bodies of their loved ones.

She seeks a way of narrating capable of “stripping bare the pain and drama of our world,” here through that lunar place of Doha, located near the international airport, which appeared to her one day, under a scorching sun, as she watched crippled people in wheelchairs wandering, like “the face of the world.” But to speak plainly of the “total loss” is also to resist the annihilation of torn lives and pulverized bodies.

Through this testimonial aim, the book joins the nonfiction part of her work, after those devoted to the bloody repression of the 2011 Syrian revolution and the ensuing war—Feux croisés and Les portes du néant—and then the very moving 19 femmes. Les Syriennes racontent, which this collection recalls in form. It is again a matter of making visible lives evacuated from the world, here by recounting not a broken revolution that resists its nullification but the precarious survival of a people in the face of an ongoing extermination enterprise.

Resistance seeks itself at the level of survival, in the very history of disfigured bodies that have had to wander, hunted by a destruction whose intensity reaches the perception of self and world, up to depersonalization: “I felt as if my brain was melting,” says Mohamad Hamdan, sixty-five, after seeing his children and grandchildren emerge from the rubble, all dead (“their faces shone with light. I looked at them for the last time and couldn’t believe it!”), then realizing that thirty members of his family no longer existed.

This ultra-violence creates not only the “strange,” a word constantly repeated, but the horrific: scenes worthy of horror films, visions of “madness” that speakers often formulate like the explosion of the world (“as if the world was splitting,” “it’s as if the whole world exploded”), which they liken to the “Last Judgment.” In this exploded world invaded by death (“Death was everywhere and everyone we cherished perished”), everyone prepares to die and, at the worst moments, doubts being still alive. The bombardment puts into a hallucinatory state the one who had the luck to “fly through the air” or be extracted from the rubble. But the between-state of life/death continues, because the task of surviving forces one to wander among corpses and sometimes to walk or roll over them.

Above all, the between-state is lived literally in the flesh: untreated wounded see the injured part of their body rot, eaten by maggots, and only amputation—often multiple and performed in appalling conditions—allows them to survive. Not always: amputees often die from untreated illnesses, exhaustion and famine, or the invisible effects of toxic weapons. “Our bodies had become prisons,” says one of them. “I was no longer able to imagine an intact body,” says Amal ad-Adham, twenty-four, a healthcare worker at the Indonesian hospital and witness to its evacuation. “Our dread was profound,” says another, and that simple sentence perhaps says the essential.

In Gaza there is no child

We are at the heart of dread, and the story mentioned earlier is far from the most terrible. Nasma al-Fara, forty-one, mother of five, sees two of them die in the explosion of her home on October 10; one daughter badly burned, another amputated and her face split; on their arrival at Nasser hospital she sees a large number of children burned by phosphorus, “the face destroyed.” Abdelrahman Hamde, seventeen, a photographer and literature student, lost his entire family on December 24 in an “explosion of red,” recognizes some relatives by their clothes, then finds himself alone in a wheelchair in the hell of al-Aqsa hospital and later in displaced persons’ tents in Rafah.

In every story one finds little Mohamad’s “everything is red”: “I was convinced I was dead. […] I saw blood everywhere. The color red drowned my gaze,” says another Mohamad, eighteen, wounded in the leg and sheltered at the Martyrs al-Aqsa hospital, where, his body “devoured” by a missile, he sees the victims of another massacre arrive in Deir al-Balah—piled corpses and dislocated bodies put into plastic bags like “cheap pieces of meat.” “We were surrounded by massacres,” says Hajer Abou Semaan, thirty, mother of three, who, amputated at Shifa hospital, finds her son she thought dead operated on and amputated of a foot—but, both immobilized, they can only smile at each other from a distance; then the family is dispersed from one hospital to another, and she remains alone with no news.

The most terrible stories—those of forced evacuations of hospitals—describe a deluge of cruelties by Israeli soldiers mad with hatred, who look for or pretend to look for hostages and Hamas weapons. Their conduct evokes a pantomime of Nazi violences, as if the memory of the Shoah were resurfacing in reverse through their gestures, and scenes of ultra-violent cinema in the style of Tarantino, without the humor.

They blow up entrance doors they could have opened, storm operating rooms and stop people mid-operation, drive their tanks into mortuary rooms and crush everything and everyone in their path, so that the dead “were seen ground again” (Amal al-Adham, twenty-four); they fire blindly, release dogs, force multi-amputees to move, beat their stumps, torture the disabled, scan the eyes of a little girl whose injured head nods despite orders not to move. The question why resurfaces incessantly: why hospitals, maternity wards? why such weapons? why universities (“I never understood why they targeted education”)? Why children?

“The children, little chicks, are all dead!” says Jihan al-Bekri, a student of Arabic literature, who, saved from a bombing and amputated of both legs, finds herself “repeating again and again” the story of their death. We know how young Gaza’s population was; of more than 60,000 killed by the army, the number of children approaches 20,000, not counting countless missing. Targeting children is one of the signatures of the genocide, of its radical “no why—no pity,” and the destruction of childhood is one of its effects: the child mobilizes particular resources to think the nonsense of what is happening, which also annihilates his childhood .

“Why did I lose my family? What meaning does this have? In Gaza, there are no children. […] They tell me I am a child! I don’t know what that means,” says Abdallah, thirteen, the one who no longer has a face: he saw his family burn in a UNRWA bus, and keeps thinking about Jad, the little brother he failed to save. “The number of dead and injured among children was enormous,” says Huda al-Baghdadi, thirty-three, a teacher who, after losing twenty-four members of her family, accompanies survivors to the European hospital and plays nurse, torn between her two brothers and the other children. “They constituted the most significant part of the victims. They were also those who showed the most strength, coping with everything that happened with rigor and constancy. […] It was incredible! Where did they draw that courage from?”

“Gaza’s children grow up quickly,” says Ibrahim Qudaih, twenty-one, a student from Khan Younis who became a nurse at Nasser hospital, seeing a ten-year-old child stubbornly trying to reassemble the scattered parts of the dead. “Who would expect to see a child gather pieces of other children? I’ve seen so much, so much, and these scenes haunt me to this day,” says the young man, before recounting how he himself was later amputated of both legs and an arm after an explosion made him fly and land 300 meters away. The one called the “living martyr” finishes his story: “I have dreams for the future; I certainly only have half a body left, but my soul and my reason are very much there. I have the ambition to write stories, to continue my studies. And one day I will return to Gaza, my love.”

Huda, the teacher who had worked “to teach children to accept their new incomplete body,” says she “gained another way of thinking” by “thus approaching the human body” in these abnormal situations, and “began to see our existence differently.” “I will never be the same again. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. All I know is that without our faith in God we would go mad.” S, thirty-four, who wanted to become a writer, haunted by the little corridor of light that allowed her to be pulled from the rubble, says at the end of her story: “I am still alive, with only half a body. One day I will write about all this, but not now.”

Photo credit Gaza (February 2025) © CC-BY-SA-4.0/Jaber Jehad Badwan/WikiCommons