Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza

by Wasim Said

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?

Genres: Nonfiction

140 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2025

Reviews

[Rana · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the description says, these stories are extremely hard to stomach. The author writes these stories not only to memorialize the martyrs but to put responsibility on the readers. Now that we are witnesses like the author, who is still undergoing a genocide, what will we do is the central question. Nothing will ever be adequate in the face of the unspeakable horrors the author writes about, but we start with being witnesses.

[Arif Silverman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating but essential read.

Wasim Said’s bravery, decency, and humanity are on astonishing display in this harrowing firsthand account of the genocide in Gaza. What begins as an autobiographical narrative grows to encompass the lives and deaths of other Gazans whose stories he has extracted either from interviews or witnessing their martyrdoms firsthand. The details are graphic and heartbreaking - it is impossible for anyone with a shred of empathy not to be moved.

As someone living in the western world, I find it troubling that my immediate instinct after reading such horror is to shut down, to seek respite in whatever comforts I have readily available to me. But Said’s text implores us to act otherwise, as he and the people of Gaza have done. This is not a moment to despair, but to act: disrupt conversations at dinner tables, march in protests, call your elected officials and voice your outrage, boycott companies that benefit from their investments in this genocide. And, perhaps most pertinently, do not take lightly the political power of the written word. In this text’s preface, Louis Allday speaks to this last point it better than I can - “Wasim’s text is not simply a moving and gut-wrenching testimony of genocide and displacement, but rather a defiant act of resistance to it.”

May we all contribute to and derive knowledge from the literature of resistance.

[Jennifer Abdo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't keep saying you have to read this book to all of this type (though I firmly believe this!), but in this short volume you'll witness some of the worst of the genocide committed by the Israeli monsters. The flour massacre where they unloaded a pile of flour in front of starving Palestinians, then Israeli snipers targeted and killed them individually en masse with head and chest shots. And the men taken hostage, stripped to their underwear and tortured, chased from the site by tanks with several being ground to parts under the treads. We should be a witness. We have to stop it.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this should be required reading. I think that more people should read testimonies written from Gaza by Palestinians during the genocide.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is utterly horrific. I’ve read several firsthand accounts of the genocide and this is the most brutal and the most graphic yet. The family that was grateful to find refuge in an abandoned villa, until an Israeli sniper murdered their mother and shot at anyone trying to bury her, leaving no choice but to put her corpse in the refrigerator. A boy who survives a missile strike, but whose facial features melt from the heat. Flour used as bait (the infamous flour massacre of February 29, 2024). A man splattered with what he believes to be mud - until he realizes that it’s a human throat. Men crushed deliberately crushed under tank treads simply for the sheer sadistic pleasure it imparts. The schoolroom where a shell killed an entire family - the lucky ones, instantly; the less fortunate, by burning them to death, their last moments spent hearing their loved ones scream as they themselves are incinerated.

I don’t have the words to describe how monstrously evil the perpetrators of these atrocities are. The devil himself would weep at their cruelty. And the thought that they may never face justice for their crimes is simply unbearable. Each and every one of us owes it to the Palestinians of Gaza both to fight for accountability for their butchers, and to help them make new lives for themselves on their own land.

[Ethan Mollenauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has still yet to grasp the urgency, realness, cruelty and resilience surrounding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians over the last two years, please read this testimony.

As Wasim says, “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.”

[Soumaya Hajji]

I cannot rate this book. It is a difficult and harrowing read. I felt immense guilt with every page, anger at the world but mainly myself. Many of the scenes are graphic, more so than when watching them on a screen. How can humanity move on from these atrocities? How am I supposed to go on when my every breath feels traitorous? How much more can we amplify the voices of Gaza until people start to truly care and act??

One quote that stuck with me, that will haunt me:
"I write only in the hope that this pain will stir something in the future generations."
Let us not be the generation that ignores the suffering of others, content to enjoy only this fleeting dunya, without a care for the akhira.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no words. Every person who has remained silent as we watch this genocide be perpetrated by the terrorist state of Israel, and worse, every person who has dared to imply that this genocide is somehow warranted, should be forced to read Wasim Said's brutal, unflinching account of the horrors he has witnessed. And, dear God, these horrors are still. happening. now. Free Palestine, forever and always.

[Matthew Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really powerful eyewitness of the absolutely horrible conditions Gazans have been subjected to during the last few years and a plea to action that reminds you on the one hand not to give into powerlessness, but on the other that you're not doing nearly enough to help.

[Alex Giacobbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please read this book. Wasim’s story and the accounts he shares are unimaginable nightmares. But they are real, and they are happening in Gaza.

As someone who lives in the west, a privileged and comfy life in the US, I feel a deep shame reading this book. I feel complicit knowing that my tax money goes to funding this genocide, that the politicians we’ve elected turn a blind eye, or worse, actively support it.

I’ve read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and The Palestine Laboratory (both recommended), but they are historical narratives. Wasim Said is a witness and his words cut to the bone. I believe the stories he shares will make you a witness as well.

[Jeffrey Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that covers the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The brutality and violence of the Israeli occupation is on full display in these accounts. This book explicitly asks that we not give in to despair and go about our day-to-day, but do all that we can in the struggle for a free Palestine. Find an organization and do the necessary work to fight back against U.S. imperialism and the war machine that keeps dropping tax payer-funded bombs on Palestine.

[Holly M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written during a genocide rather than after, gives this book a unique, tense, desperate, terrifying and deeply heartbreaking perspective. Wasim is clearly an intellectual who was unsure if he would be able to finish this book. As of right now, his future is still unclear. His nightmare continues. His only copy of this book got ruined in flooding. This is a necessary yet devastating book to read.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Said writes his lived experience of the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in a series of short vignettes. He writes with unsparing detail, providing an on-the-ground view of many massacres we have received filtered and often distorted through the Western media or which we receive in merely images and not how these rending moments fit within the larger story of a young man and his family surviving barbaric assault after assault. But this isn’t the only note in the book. Mousa Alsadah’s forward: “Genocide, as a concept, is not merely mass killing. It is a systematic colonial process aiming to dismantle the colonized society, its material structures, institutions, and self-organization. But at its deepest level, it aims to destroy the moral structure of that society, to fracture it into scattered individuals, each preying on the other to survive. / And here arises this testimony—not only as a daily record of generosity, selflessness, truth, and cooperation, but as proof, in itself, of an astonishing resilience in the moral structure of this community under genocide.” Said reports on those acts of generosity, selflessness, truth and cooperation; he also reflects on what stories need to be told to maintain this moral structure in subtle ways. Here he describes a conversation with his friend Mousa, who had survived a flour massacre. Mousa: “ ‘The hungry people ran towards him, not to save him, but to snatch the sack of flour from his hands.’ / Astonished, I asked, ‘People from Gaza did that?!’ / Mousa covered his face with his hands. ‘Be quiet, Wasim. Be quiet! Hunger is bad, Wasim. When you have children crying from hunger right in front of you, you will do whatever you can so that they can eat.’” It's a layered book. In the group I read this with, one member, who had only been learning about the genocide from wildly partial sources like The New York Times, started the conversation by saying that what she read was so extreme, so disturbing, it couldn’t be real. After the conversation, she bought a Keffiyeh, put it on, and walked out into the world where that will make some of the worst people apoplectic. It’s a startling, profound book, one that has and will shake people into action. Action on a multitude of levels. And in a just future, the one we make, it will be one that we’ve all read, reflected on. Wasim Said remains in Gaza and has launched a collective fundraiser in tandem with the book.
https://chuffed.org/project/158294-fo...

[ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was die Grenzen des bürgerlichen „Antifaschismus“ sind, zeigen uns die deutsche Bourgeoisie und ihre politischen, medialen und kulturellen Vertreter mit aller Deutlichkeit seit nun schon mehr als zwei Jahren. Das Gelöbnis „nie wider!“ wird in sein exaktes Gegenteil verkehrt und zum militanten Marschbefehl: jetzt aber mit aller Gewalt erneut einen Genozid zu unterstützen, zu verteidigen, zu bewaffnen.

Was Völkermord für die betroffenen Menschen bedeutet, zeigt Wasim Said in diesem Buch. Er ist selbst junger Palästinenser, lebt in Gaza, erlebt den Genozid noch in diesem Moment mit – und er hat währenddessen dieses Buch geschrieben, das von den unendlichen Qualen der Menschen dort berichtet. Es ist sehr schwer zu ertragen, was hier berichtet wird. Die bestialischste Entmenschlichung, die man sich nur vorstellen kann, sie wird noch überstiegen von den Taten der Zionist:innen, die unsere Regierung tatkräftig unterstützt.

Wasim ist bemüht – mit einigem Erfolg – diese Schreckensberichte in literarische Form zu gießen. Und er zeigt, wie sich die Palästinenser:inne trotz aller Entmenschlichung ihre Menschlichkeit oft bewahren können. Wie sie nicht einfach Opfer sein wollen, sondern Anklage erheben gegen eine Welt, die diesem Geschehen keinen Einhalt gebietet. Das Buch selbst ist ein Triumph, den Wasim dem Vernichtungswahn der Zionist:innen abgerungen hat.

Das ist mit aller Wahrscheinlichkeit das erste Buch in einer neuen, traurigen und in revolutionäre Praxis zu verwandelnden Tradition von Holocaustliteratur. Trauer allein bringt nichts, man muss dieser Hölle ein Ende bereiten, und das heißt dieses Schweinesystem endgültig zu zerschlagen.

[Noor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading in schools for everyone. It's hard to write in words how vivid Wasim's writing is so I won't. And there are too many quotes and paragraphs that wrecked me to paste them here. His writing is so raw that it takes you back to the moments where the genocide was being live-streamed in front of us all in real time, and reminds us that we have not done enough. I think this book is the perfect length to be given to any person who has not come to terms with the genocide in Gaza because you cannot get through the first few pages without feeling a sense of shame that we have not done anything for them.

Some lines from Wasim's first chapter:
"I write it 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."

"I don't need your sympathy. I need a conscience that hasn't rotted. A human who hasn't turned to stone. I need a reader who won't just close the book and sigh, Then go to sip their coffee."

"Read this not as a novel. But as you would read a gravestone. As if a voice from beneath the ground was saying: 'I was here. And I could have lived-If only you had said something.'"

Chills. Also major props to the translators who translated this from Arabic to English because it was very well done. I wonder if I can find the Arabic version somewhere because I am sure it is even more heart-wrenching. Tonight please include the people of Gaza in your duaas.

[Victoria Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t need to be informed about the hell Israel has provided for the Palestinian people in Gaza. The book is relentless in its reporting of the misery suffered. The relentlessness almost makes one question its veracity. The author is a young man of 23 who is not a writer and it shows in that he does not have the skill to make the reader believe it’s not propaganda. A more experienced writer would have interspersed the horrors with descriptions of humanity. The lack of skill does not take away from the reality. Other books and news stories have convinced me that Israel is perpetrating a great evil for which it must, in a just world, be held accountable.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating account of the genocide in Gaza from someone still enduring it. The stories in it are so harrowing, the violence so grotesque and gratuitous, it's hard to countenance that such cruelty can be committed by human beings onto other human beings. Yet the proof is everywhere, in this book and on our phone screens. Said calls the Zionists "monsters", and they truly are monsters to kill, starve, torture, and humiliate people like this. This is a book that infuriates you and makes you despair, but Said calls upon his readers not to pity him or feel helpless but to do something, anything, everything to stop the hellfire.

[Victor Guinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most important book of the 21st century. comparable to Weisel's Night. Our US tax dollars have gone toward the genocide of the Palestinian people. We are complicit in the murders of men, women, and children. Read if you are capable of critical thinking and compassion toward your fellow human beings.

[Ziggi Chavez · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no time left in this world to contain the grief that flows in these words. My heart bleeds with Wasim, and these wounds will only heal in a free Palestine. Share this far and wide; and Never Forget the Truth in their Pain.

[Eilidh Mcindoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

To anyone struggling to comprehend the trauma the Palestinians are enduring, READ THIS! Although not light reading and at times very unsettling, it is so well done written that it makes you want to carry on.
How can anyone treat another human being this way, it makes me SICK!

[Lasairfhíona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it.

Then do something.

[Jayna · Rating 5 out of 5]

just absolutely gut wrenching

[alexander mae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating

[Nadeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Read this not as a novel.
But as you would read a gravestone.
As if a voice from beneath the ground was saying:

'I was here. And I could have lived—
If only you had said something.'"

[Yazeed]

“Read this not as a novel. But as you would a gravestone. As if a voice from the ground was saying: I was here. And I could have lived - if only you had said something.”
•
“Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza” by Wasim Said is a memoir written in the throes of genocide, recorded by the author while he was displaced in a tent in Gaza, with the bombs, bullets, and fires raging upon him and all he knew. He writes of the constant fear and uncertainty in search for survival, the deadly trials of seeking food aid, of witnessing the deaths of hundreds of people in single swift strikes. Those of us who live outside of Gaza will never be able to comprehend the sheer scale of this genocide, regardless of the narratives we read and the vivid descriptions of the scenes, the sounds, the smells, the raw emotion of witnessing pure evil unleashed on your entirety. It is difficult for us to read, but it is more difficult for them to survive, and it remains a duty to amplify their testimonies.