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Requiem pour Gaza
In a profound and elegiac work of investigative journalism, the writer Chris Hedges and the cartoonist Joe Sacco collaborate to present the testimony of displaced Palestinians who lived through the genocide.
In the spring of 2025 the cartoonist Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and Chris Hedges, the former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, traveled to Cairo where they interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had recently left Gaza. In Requiem for Gaza, they use the experience and stories of these families to detail the crucible of the genocide, the loss of homes and communities, the appalling death toll among friends and loved ones, the constant displacement, the terror of indiscriminate killing, the hunger and deprivation, the obliteration of all that was known and familiar, and the struggle to cope with the callous indifference of a world that continues to supply Israel with weapons despite its wholesale destruction of Gaza and mass slaughter.
Requiem for Gaza, like their New York Times best seller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, combines comics and single images drawn by Sacco within the narrative written by Hedges. Hedges’ vivid prose and Sacco’s visceral images complement each other and together paint a portrait of dignity and suffering under genocide. The collective power of the individual stories that chronicle the first day of the genocide, the forced evacuation of homes, the targeted assassinations, the false hopes engendered by ceasefires, the dislocation and alienation of exile, the brutal killing and hasty burial of family members, and the humiliation of living under tarps without clean food and water bring every aspect of the genocide to life. Set against this horror are stories of self-sacrifice and compassion that show how Palestinians not only clung to their humanity, but morally triumphed over their killers.
In the spring of 2025 the cartoonist Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and Chris Hedges, the former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, traveled to Cairo where they interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had recently left Gaza. In Requiem for Gaza, they use the experience and stories of these families to detail the crucible of the genocide, the loss of homes and communities, the appalling death toll among friends and loved ones, the constant displacement, the terror of indiscriminate killing, the hunger and deprivation, the obliteration of all that was known and familiar, and the struggle to cope with the callous indifference of a world that continues to supply Israel with weapons despite its wholesale destruction of Gaza and mass slaughter.
Requiem for Gaza, like their New York Times best seller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, combines comics and single images drawn by Sacco within the narrative written by Hedges. Hedges’ vivid prose and Sacco’s visceral images complement each other and together paint a portrait of dignity and suffering under genocide. The collective power of the individual stories that chronicle the first day of the genocide, the forced evacuation of homes, the targeted assassinations, the false hopes engendered by ceasefires, the dislocation and alienation of exile, the brutal killing and hasty burial of family members, and the humiliation of living under tarps without clean food and water bring every aspect of the genocide to life. Set against this horror are stories of self-sacrifice and compassion that show how Palestinians not only clung to their humanity, but morally triumphed over their killers.
160 pages, Hardcover
Published August 19, 2026
About the author
Joe Sacco
74 books1,673 followersJoe Sacco was born in Malta on October 2, 1960. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Australia, where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip lead him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Goražde near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Sacco currently lives in Portland.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip lead him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Goražde near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Sacco currently lives in Portland.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy
I was fortunate to receive this title as a pre-pub ARC.
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco once again team up for a heart-wrenching look at Israel's current and ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Sacco's illustrations are downplayed here, though, in favor of Hedges' straightforward journalistic documentation of the events. In some ways, this is a continuation of Hedges' reporting in his most recent previous book, 'A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine' (2025). In both, he documents the horrific human suffering taking place and the complicity of many around the world in enabling it.
History is watching.
Best of 2026.
And now, cue the one-star reviews with tin-eared screeching about "both sides", "antisemitism", and blah blah blah as humans continue to be massacred.
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco once again team up for a heart-wrenching look at Israel's current and ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Sacco's illustrations are downplayed here, though, in favor of Hedges' straightforward journalistic documentation of the events. In some ways, this is a continuation of Hedges' reporting in his most recent previous book, 'A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine' (2025). In both, he documents the horrific human suffering taking place and the complicity of many around the world in enabling it.
History is watching.
Best of 2026.
And now, cue the one-star reviews with tin-eared screeching about "both sides", "antisemitism", and blah blah blah as humans continue to be massacred.
October 16, 2026
This was a really great book, couldn't recommend it enough, especially if you're trying to learn more about how the genocide unfolded over the past three years.
It's mainly a collection of interviews that Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco did with various people who survived the genocide. A lot of the book focuses on the experiences of these survivors during the height of the genocide in 2023 and 2024, bouncing around different points and time and people throughout the book.
You aren't going to find the most organized and focused account of why the genocide happened, how to fight against it, or a specific biography. This is a book that utilizes interviews and various interjections from Hedges to paint an emotional picture about how it feels being the victim of genocide, told by the people most affected by it.
Also, if you're expecting a proper Sacco graphic novel, you're not going to find it here. There are only a couple of pages in this book that have illustrations, the rest are a collection of interviews and recollections from Hedges and Sacco.
It's worth a read just to hear about the experiences of Gazans throughout different points in the genocide. If you're like me and have been aware of what's going on since the beginning, it zooms in on some individual experiences during the worst months. If you don't know much about the genocide and want to learn more, it's a short and enthralling book giving you the cliffnotes on how and why this actually happened, and gives you a more human perspective on Gaza than most Western media will.
If you're just learning about the genocide though, do yourself a favor and read things written by actual Palestinian authors and journalists. Give this to your friends who may want to learn more but are too lazy to read longer books or articles written by Palestinians. And then tell them to read something written by a Palestinian!
I hope to God things will change for the people of Gaza and Palestinians in the future. This hope may be in vain, but at least remember the martyrs can help inform our future actions.
It's mainly a collection of interviews that Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco did with various people who survived the genocide. A lot of the book focuses on the experiences of these survivors during the height of the genocide in 2023 and 2024, bouncing around different points and time and people throughout the book.
You aren't going to find the most organized and focused account of why the genocide happened, how to fight against it, or a specific biography. This is a book that utilizes interviews and various interjections from Hedges to paint an emotional picture about how it feels being the victim of genocide, told by the people most affected by it.
Also, if you're expecting a proper Sacco graphic novel, you're not going to find it here. There are only a couple of pages in this book that have illustrations, the rest are a collection of interviews and recollections from Hedges and Sacco.
It's worth a read just to hear about the experiences of Gazans throughout different points in the genocide. If you're like me and have been aware of what's going on since the beginning, it zooms in on some individual experiences during the worst months. If you don't know much about the genocide and want to learn more, it's a short and enthralling book giving you the cliffnotes on how and why this actually happened, and gives you a more human perspective on Gaza than most Western media will.
If you're just learning about the genocide though, do yourself a favor and read things written by actual Palestinian authors and journalists. Give this to your friends who may want to learn more but are too lazy to read longer books or articles written by Palestinians. And then tell them to read something written by a Palestinian!
I hope to God things will change for the people of Gaza and Palestinians in the future. This hope may be in vain, but at least remember the martyrs can help inform our future actions.
October 23, 2026
Big surprise that Zionist supporters come here and leave a 1-star review without even having the courage to explain themselves.
For those without Zionist Derangement Syndrome, video book review here: https://palestinebookshelf.substack.c...
For those without Zionist Derangement Syndrome, video book review here: https://palestinebookshelf.substack.c...
October 31, 2026
Required reading
October 31, 2026
Hard to read. Horrible to read the realities about the genocide Israel is commiting against the people of Gaza. While I know many of these stories, it's still heartbreaking to read it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews