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On the Zero Line
Amid the relentless and unprecedented violence of the ongoing assault on Gaza, ON THE ZERO LINE emerges as a polyphonic collection of diaristic writings from Gazan people, offering a raw and vital attestation to their daily struggle for survival, mem
204 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 26, 2026
“How did language become such a loose, arbitrary practice? Why do we call a break from death a “ceasefire”?”
Haunting and heartbreaking and obligatory fuck israel
Haunting and heartbreaking and obligatory fuck israel
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April 10, 2026A collection of trully heartbreaking and haunting texts written by Palestinian authors. Highly recommend and do not forget: from the river to the sea!
April 16, 2026
I was surprised, when I received this book in the post, how small it is; a mere seven by eleven centimetres, it could fit in your jeans' back pocket. Yet, its odd, unassuming design, lends it a mysterious feel, of something fleeting and unique. An apt choice given the material it contains: the accounts of nineteen different Palestinian writers living in Gaza in the immediate aftermath of the present bombardment by Israel, which began in October 2023.
Often, the truest account of a war comes from the quotidian details of those who actually lived it. News and social media may show us footage, recount politician's speeches, invite innumerable talking heads to debate what will happen next, lecturing us about military hardware and its effects. Yet nothing brings us closer than the mundane realities as told by those who are there. For example, no documentary or historical text has brought me closer to life in the concentration camps, to a realisation of what dehuminisation means, than Primo Levi's, If This is a Man.
On the Zero Line offers a similar perspective, but by no means total. It is a glimpse behind the news packages to, quite frankly, what could happen to any of us if we find ourselves on the apparently wrong side of the interests of our most powerful neighbours. I read such material because it reminds me how close any of us can come to jackboots kicking in our doors and dragging us from our homes, and what we would face if such circumstances arose. No one thinks it can happen until it does. Only once you read it can you fully appreciate the power of cooperation, understanding, kindness, in preventing such mass abuses. And, in a way, to forgive yourself your most primitive fears. In such situations, survival is often nothing to do with heroism, and shame is prevalent.
But I digress. I'll let the authors speak for themselves. As Ibrahim Nasrallah says in the foreword: 'The truth is that no one truly survives war.' In the case of Palestine, which has no recognised statehood, 'writing has always been an act of confirming existence... In the first seven hundred days of this new phase of war, every university, school, cultural and archeological centre, field, public institution, hospital, source of water and electricity - any and every thing that might help Palestinians survive, has been targeted for destruction.'
In Ismail Jahjouh's chapter, titled, 'Formula,' he recounts working at the Nasser Medical Complex when a bus arrives full of wounded. He opens the side luggage compartment to find 'a woman stretched out on her back,' her arms and legs pinned with metal rods. 'Not a single part of her body remained intact, other than her throat from which she cried out, "Don't look at me."' All her family have been killed. Pregnant with a child that the doctors managed to deliver, he and the grandmother help the child to feed from its mother's shattered body, 'She... began to pull back the mother's clothing, which was covered in medical gauze... The baby instinctively found the source of life and began to nurse.' What follows is a desperate search to find a wetnurse, or formula, for the baby. At a critical moment near the end of the piece, Jahjouh tellingly interjects, 'Don't expect, dear reader, that I triumphed and found the formula. I'm not writing an Arab screenplay.'
Other stories are powerfully lyrical and symbolic. Nayrouz Qarmout describes a desert landscape where a woman moulds sand into statues that she tries to keep from drying out, while a mysterious man watches from the shadows, stamping his feet, 'dancing a dabke... hoping someone far away might catch the echo.' The woman lost in grief and memory, while the man futilely tries to communicate their distress looking for 'the earth to answer', for the rest of the world to right these wrongs.
Many of the writers convey a feeling of their world being forever altered, 'I am losing even the knowledge of what has been lost' (Doha Al-Kahlout), of Gaza being akin to the enchanted city of fairytales, a legend, 'Someday a voice will come from the silence and say, "Something happened here." By then, Gaza will be gone... We have always been invisible to the world. We're enshrouded by a fog that hovers around our homes, curls through our trees, lingering on the coast, in shadows, around the sharp corners of streets and alleways. Tomorrow, when the sun arises, we will not be here.' (Hesham Abu Asaker).
Ahmad Issa writes of the futility of planning a will when he no longer has possessions and he or his family might not survive. He contrasts the normal activities of his family with the Israeli political narrative, 'I should believe that my wife, who expertly prepares the maqluba, is a terrorist... My only son, Fares, who came to us after seventeen years of waiting, and seven rounds of IVF-I must believe that he, too, is a terrorist... We terrrorists practice our distinct terrorist rituals. Every night, we prepare the nuts and popcorn, turn off the lights, and watch an Arabic or American film.' He mourns that his son will not get to read his father's science fiction stories, that the world 'has revealed the fiction of the claims of the supposedly civilised.'
Hasan Matar echoes this sense of giving up hope. 'People bury remains that they assume are their children... Massacres are first referred to by the name of the neighbourhood, but then the neighbourhoods are bombed multiple times... surpassed by something worse.'
Ahmad Basyouni recounts the story of Ismail, a sixteen year old boy who 'dreamed of becoming a famous You Tuber' until his house his bombed, his family forced to flee from house to house, camp to camp, among the other displaced. His brother is killed in the Jabalia massacre, returning from the market. His uncle, no longer able to receive his vital dialysis treatment, succumbs to his disease. When the family are forced towards the militarised border zone separating the north and central Gaza Strip from the south, Ismail is kidnapped by a soldier at a checkpoint and disappears into the maze of the occupation's prison systems.
The picture of life in Gaza built up by each successive story is one of hardship, a constant search for the basic living essentials. 'Each morning starts with a search for water... lines form everywhere... wood torn from the earth... women baking bread for over a million displaced and homeless people' (Hani Mousa). 'Each morning we roamed the streets in search of cardboard-to light a fire.' (Mahmoud Jouda). Jouda goes on to describe the shame and embarrassment when, reaching for the same piece of rainsoaked cardboard as an old man, he makes eye contact only to realise the man is his former school teacher, 'All I wanted was to vanish.'
In a particularly touching story, H A Al-Qatrawi, describes his son's desperate concern for his cat after an Israeli missile crashes into their neighbour's home, '...his treasure was his cat. When he found her... he picked her up and patted her back the way a father might soothe a child. "Let's get out of here, Dad. The cat is going to die."' They go to a displacement camp. Even there, friends are made, and lost. One man 'was walking beside a car when the occupation bombed it.' Gradually, the cat refuses to eat. 'Cats, like humans, get sick when forced from their homes. Our house was her home too. Being away from home is its own illness.' The author's uncle refuses to leave his home and is buried in the rubble of an airstrike. 'I thought of how my uncle and his family died. Did they scream all night, or go quickly?... The idea of slow death haunts me. Death multiplied thousands of times-from fear, from horror, from waiting.' To keep warm, the author's wife unknowingly lights the oven with the pages of his next novel. He laughs bitterly. Another kind of loss. Eventually, the son's beloved cat dies. 'His tears were nothing like tears over a scraped knee... They bespoke a tragedy... the whole world dimmed with his crying... when homelands shrink, so do souls.'
Displaced for the fourth time in forty days, in a tent surrounded by a thousand others, in the ground of al-Aqsa university, Haya Abu Nasr meditates on what the storm of military aircraft has replaced, 'the scent of the sea, the early morning dew as I walked to work... the smell of hot coffee at the office... voices of neighbours yelling at their kids.' Amongst the stench of sewage, where six families share one outdoor toilet, where children carry heavy water vessels, where it takes hours on a donkey cart to reach an internet centre to charge phones, where 'daily tasks now require long lines... basic needs have become triggers for competition,' and 'at any moment we could be killed by a stray missile,' Abu Nasr asks, 'How can the world forget us and... keep living through our erasure?' The story ends with a sighting of a blue whale out in the open ocean, a hopeful symbol of a species that has somehow evaded extinction and, despite everything, survived.
According to Slow Factory’s website, where I found On the Zero Line, editor, Tariq Asrawi, is currently unable to account for the whereabouts of all the authors included.
Often, the truest account of a war comes from the quotidian details of those who actually lived it. News and social media may show us footage, recount politician's speeches, invite innumerable talking heads to debate what will happen next, lecturing us about military hardware and its effects. Yet nothing brings us closer than the mundane realities as told by those who are there. For example, no documentary or historical text has brought me closer to life in the concentration camps, to a realisation of what dehuminisation means, than Primo Levi's, If This is a Man.
On the Zero Line offers a similar perspective, but by no means total. It is a glimpse behind the news packages to, quite frankly, what could happen to any of us if we find ourselves on the apparently wrong side of the interests of our most powerful neighbours. I read such material because it reminds me how close any of us can come to jackboots kicking in our doors and dragging us from our homes, and what we would face if such circumstances arose. No one thinks it can happen until it does. Only once you read it can you fully appreciate the power of cooperation, understanding, kindness, in preventing such mass abuses. And, in a way, to forgive yourself your most primitive fears. In such situations, survival is often nothing to do with heroism, and shame is prevalent.
But I digress. I'll let the authors speak for themselves. As Ibrahim Nasrallah says in the foreword: 'The truth is that no one truly survives war.' In the case of Palestine, which has no recognised statehood, 'writing has always been an act of confirming existence... In the first seven hundred days of this new phase of war, every university, school, cultural and archeological centre, field, public institution, hospital, source of water and electricity - any and every thing that might help Palestinians survive, has been targeted for destruction.'
In Ismail Jahjouh's chapter, titled, 'Formula,' he recounts working at the Nasser Medical Complex when a bus arrives full of wounded. He opens the side luggage compartment to find 'a woman stretched out on her back,' her arms and legs pinned with metal rods. 'Not a single part of her body remained intact, other than her throat from which she cried out, "Don't look at me."' All her family have been killed. Pregnant with a child that the doctors managed to deliver, he and the grandmother help the child to feed from its mother's shattered body, 'She... began to pull back the mother's clothing, which was covered in medical gauze... The baby instinctively found the source of life and began to nurse.' What follows is a desperate search to find a wetnurse, or formula, for the baby. At a critical moment near the end of the piece, Jahjouh tellingly interjects, 'Don't expect, dear reader, that I triumphed and found the formula. I'm not writing an Arab screenplay.'
Other stories are powerfully lyrical and symbolic. Nayrouz Qarmout describes a desert landscape where a woman moulds sand into statues that she tries to keep from drying out, while a mysterious man watches from the shadows, stamping his feet, 'dancing a dabke... hoping someone far away might catch the echo.' The woman lost in grief and memory, while the man futilely tries to communicate their distress looking for 'the earth to answer', for the rest of the world to right these wrongs.
Many of the writers convey a feeling of their world being forever altered, 'I am losing even the knowledge of what has been lost' (Doha Al-Kahlout), of Gaza being akin to the enchanted city of fairytales, a legend, 'Someday a voice will come from the silence and say, "Something happened here." By then, Gaza will be gone... We have always been invisible to the world. We're enshrouded by a fog that hovers around our homes, curls through our trees, lingering on the coast, in shadows, around the sharp corners of streets and alleways. Tomorrow, when the sun arises, we will not be here.' (Hesham Abu Asaker).
Ahmad Issa writes of the futility of planning a will when he no longer has possessions and he or his family might not survive. He contrasts the normal activities of his family with the Israeli political narrative, 'I should believe that my wife, who expertly prepares the maqluba, is a terrorist... My only son, Fares, who came to us after seventeen years of waiting, and seven rounds of IVF-I must believe that he, too, is a terrorist... We terrrorists practice our distinct terrorist rituals. Every night, we prepare the nuts and popcorn, turn off the lights, and watch an Arabic or American film.' He mourns that his son will not get to read his father's science fiction stories, that the world 'has revealed the fiction of the claims of the supposedly civilised.'
Hasan Matar echoes this sense of giving up hope. 'People bury remains that they assume are their children... Massacres are first referred to by the name of the neighbourhood, but then the neighbourhoods are bombed multiple times... surpassed by something worse.'
Ahmad Basyouni recounts the story of Ismail, a sixteen year old boy who 'dreamed of becoming a famous You Tuber' until his house his bombed, his family forced to flee from house to house, camp to camp, among the other displaced. His brother is killed in the Jabalia massacre, returning from the market. His uncle, no longer able to receive his vital dialysis treatment, succumbs to his disease. When the family are forced towards the militarised border zone separating the north and central Gaza Strip from the south, Ismail is kidnapped by a soldier at a checkpoint and disappears into the maze of the occupation's prison systems.
The picture of life in Gaza built up by each successive story is one of hardship, a constant search for the basic living essentials. 'Each morning starts with a search for water... lines form everywhere... wood torn from the earth... women baking bread for over a million displaced and homeless people' (Hani Mousa). 'Each morning we roamed the streets in search of cardboard-to light a fire.' (Mahmoud Jouda). Jouda goes on to describe the shame and embarrassment when, reaching for the same piece of rainsoaked cardboard as an old man, he makes eye contact only to realise the man is his former school teacher, 'All I wanted was to vanish.'
In a particularly touching story, H A Al-Qatrawi, describes his son's desperate concern for his cat after an Israeli missile crashes into their neighbour's home, '...his treasure was his cat. When he found her... he picked her up and patted her back the way a father might soothe a child. "Let's get out of here, Dad. The cat is going to die."' They go to a displacement camp. Even there, friends are made, and lost. One man 'was walking beside a car when the occupation bombed it.' Gradually, the cat refuses to eat. 'Cats, like humans, get sick when forced from their homes. Our house was her home too. Being away from home is its own illness.' The author's uncle refuses to leave his home and is buried in the rubble of an airstrike. 'I thought of how my uncle and his family died. Did they scream all night, or go quickly?... The idea of slow death haunts me. Death multiplied thousands of times-from fear, from horror, from waiting.' To keep warm, the author's wife unknowingly lights the oven with the pages of his next novel. He laughs bitterly. Another kind of loss. Eventually, the son's beloved cat dies. 'His tears were nothing like tears over a scraped knee... They bespoke a tragedy... the whole world dimmed with his crying... when homelands shrink, so do souls.'
Displaced for the fourth time in forty days, in a tent surrounded by a thousand others, in the ground of al-Aqsa university, Haya Abu Nasr meditates on what the storm of military aircraft has replaced, 'the scent of the sea, the early morning dew as I walked to work... the smell of hot coffee at the office... voices of neighbours yelling at their kids.' Amongst the stench of sewage, where six families share one outdoor toilet, where children carry heavy water vessels, where it takes hours on a donkey cart to reach an internet centre to charge phones, where 'daily tasks now require long lines... basic needs have become triggers for competition,' and 'at any moment we could be killed by a stray missile,' Abu Nasr asks, 'How can the world forget us and... keep living through our erasure?' The story ends with a sighting of a blue whale out in the open ocean, a hopeful symbol of a species that has somehow evaded extinction and, despite everything, survived.
According to Slow Factory’s website, where I found On the Zero Line, editor, Tariq Asrawi, is currently unable to account for the whereabouts of all the authors included.
April 7, 2026
This is a book that stands in the face of occupation, restoring to the homes and gardens destroyed by the Israeli occupation the memory of their people. These stories, written during the genocide, were written so that the stories themselves may survive death.
May 6, 2026
A powerful, almost painful thing to read. Some of it was quite heart breaking. A few of them were better than others, but they all contained that true sense of hopelessness that is worth understanding, but it made it a tough read.
July 6, 2026
Fine collection of short essays by Palestinian writers expressing personal perspectives about life in Gaza since Israel’s brutal response to the horrific October 7 attack by Hamas. Sad, inspirational, maddening…
April 14, 2026
Sprakeloos.
June 21, 2026
Deeply affecting. I've never seen a more honest and no-punched-pulled portrayal of post-Oct-6th life in Gaza.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews