Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza

by Samar Yazbek, Leri Price (Translator)

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza asking each one of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. She has selected twenty-six of these narratives to share with the world. Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, who have witnessed what history may one day remember as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their stories, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate. The title, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, is adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

250 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 21, 2026

About the author

- Syrian writer
- born in Jableh city, 1970
- published her first stories collection in 1999
- wrote many scripts for movies and TV series while working in the Syrian state TV, and she produced and presented the show of "Library Story" in 2008
- worked in Al-Hayat newspaper for 10 years, and published in many Syrian and Arab newspapers
- published four novels, and three books
- her A Woman in The Crossfire was translated into five languages
- co-founded in 2012 "Women NOW" development organization that is concerned with educational and economical empowerment of women and children

Reviews

[Louise CB · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be mandatory in the name of humanity. Heartbreaking. Nobody with a hunch of human empathy will be able to read this without being utterly shocked.

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[Jack Birrell]

“The people of Gaza don’t need our pity, but our acknowledgment of their bravery, their dignity and their rights, and their urgent wish to disciple the truth of their tragedy.”

“You need to be insane to imagine it, then believe it.”

Arguably one of the hardest books I’ve ever read while also being one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

[a.bbyjane · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Along the way, cars drove through corpses. This is no exaggeration, there were corpses everywhere, left lying in piles. Gaza had become a city of the murdered, a city of ghosts.”

Khaled Abu Samra
30 years old
Al-Shifa Hospital

[I. Mahmood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memories of Diminishment: On Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza

Read the full review here:
https://arablit.org/2026/03/17/memori...

[Lottie C · Rating 5 out of 5]

5⭐️

Feels wrong to rate a book like this, but I’m giving it 5 stars to tell you that you should read it—for the sake of humanity

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandatory reading. Devastating.

[Isabella Wordsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wow, beautiful, devestating and gripping account