Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide

“To write stories in the heart of an unfolding genocide is to draw ink from the depths of your own heart,” writes Huzama Habayeb, the Arabic editor of Every Moment Is a Life. “To read stories of genocide, while the slaughter rages relentlessly, unceasingly, means that—at the very least—your heart will be crushed.”

She is right. Reading this anthology is a crushing experience. More than once the book has to be put down, and each time the reader picks it up again, because the people who wrote it deserve to be heard to the end.

The collection was compiled by the Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa. It brings together heart-rending true stories by eighteen young writers from Gaza. They wrote in Arabic while Israel’s bombs fell around them, and the book is published in a bilingual Arabic-English edition by Atria/One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All proceeds go to the contributors in Gaza and to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.

The origin of this compilation has its roots in two journeys made by Abulhawa to Gaza in 2024. On both visits, she crossed into the besieged enclave with as many bags of aid as she could carry. While there, she collected stories from women recovering in hospital. Many wept as they described what they had seen, heard and felt, often exploring those details aloud for the first time, and the sessions became what Abulhawa calls “a kind of Indigenous therapy”. 

Two friends, Majeda Saqqa and Maha elRa’ee, asked Abulhawa to run a writing workshop for young people at the Culture and Free Thought Association (CFTA). Every writer included in the collection had been displaced and had lost people they loved. Struck by the writers’ talent for storytelling, Abulhawa decided that the most useful thing she could do was to help Palestinians in Gaza tell their story of living through genocide.

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The workshops were held on the beach and in the CFTA courtyard, under the constant buzz of Israeli drones. The stories that emerged draw the reader into the heart of their reality: ordinary human moments, buying bread, mending a shoe, sharing a meal, set against what Abulhawa describes as “the first live-streamed genocide”.

Habayeb spent more than three months editing the Arabic stories with the writers entirely over WhatsApp. She calls it an “emotional odyssey”. She would send her notes and then wait, sometimes for days, fearing the worst. One reply read: “I buried my wife yesterday; please bear with me until the mourning period ends.” Another writer apologised for the delay because the family had fled to the sea and still had nowhere to sleep. A third hoped to send the final version at the weekend, adding: “my brother was martyred.”

In Every Moment Is a Life, the story that gives the book its title, Rizq Ahmad describes four families sharing a makeshift nylon shack, which they carry from one so-called “safe zone” to another. They nickname it “The Four Coupons”, after their food-aid vouchers.

There is no mirror in the shack. Anyone wanting to check their appearance turns to Ahmad’s mother, Hanan, who finds them beautiful whatever they look like. Ahmad’s trousers barely stay up, even with a belt wrapped around his waist. As he leaves the shack, his brother calls after him: “Don’t stay out long! I need the pants later.”

Even in these impossible times, Ahmad finds warmth in the family’s life together. They still gather for meals around a rickety table or on a mat on the ground, and lunch turns into lively political debate. They laugh as they squeeze together to sleep, sharing whatever food they have.

“A new intimacy formed among us—no blame, no complaints, no regret,” he writes. “Maybe because every minute of life is a whole life, one that cannot be taken for granted.”

In Ma’rouf, Ghassan Salam tells the story of Sami, who spends a night hiding in a greenhouse after fleeing Khan Younis. Across an open field, a baby is crying in his dead mother’s arms. Sami fears that trying to reach the child will get them both killed. For hours he listens, blaming himself each time the crying fades. After daybreak, he reaches the boy and carries him to safety.

Sami cares for the child as his own and names him Ma’rouf, which means “known”. Later, he finds papers showing that the boy’s real name is Adam and returns him to his uncle. When the uncle’s house is bombed, killing the rest of the family, Sami rushes to the scene and recognises the boy, alive but injured, as medics rescue the casualties.

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“I recognized him by his little toes. I had kissed them so many times.”

An aunt later takes the child north to Jabalia. Sitting in a café some time afterwards, Sami watches breaking news of an Israeli air strike there and sees the boy among the bodies in the street. “Ma’rouf was gone. And I was left behind.”

In Khadija Abu-Lebdeh’s The Decision, the narrator, Ghada, has lost both her parents in the genocide and watched her brother Qasim die of illness. She clings to his bed, the last trace of their life together, its headboard covered in his drawings. But the family has burned everything else they own for cooking, and her older brother asks her to give it up.

“Are memories of our departed loved ones more important than those still living?”

Ghada lets it go and watches the fire take Qasim’s drawings. One charred scrap of paper drifts into her lap with just two words left on it: “the living”.

In Coffee by Old Blue, Muhammad Mu’ammar’s narrator takes his morning coffee to the sea he calls Old Blue, his friend since childhood. He had always dreamed of living by the sea. Now he does, in a tent, after being driven from his home and helping gather the remains of thirty or more relatives.

“My dream came true at last, but not as I dreamed.”

The narrator and his wife used to sit there together. Now he sits alone, having buried her with his own hands. “I do not dare call her name now.” He has come back to the sea, he says, “to become like you. An old blue soul. An immensity of silence.”

Umbilical Cord by Maysa Salama is a love story told in sign language. At an Israeli checkpoint, soldiers order the men to fall back. The husband is deaf, and his wife translates the orders for him with her hands. Before they part, he writes their three-year-old daughter’s name on his wife’s hand and ties the girl’s wrist to her mother’s with rope, like a new umbilical cord that might deliver the child safely into the world a second time.

The mother walks on, still bleeding after giving birth only days earlier, the newborn crying at her chest, until she faints. When she comes round, her daughter tells her: “Mama, you were going to fly away if I hadn’t held on to you.”

Not every writer offers the steadfastness the world expects of Palestinians. In For Gaza to Leave Us Something, Nebal Al-Najjar describes being displaced four times and her wish to escape Gaza’s destruction. Abulhawa praises her for daring to write what a world that expects Palestinians to be superheroes may not want to hear.

No review can do justice to this book. It is not one to be read once and put away. In the hospital in Gaza, the women who first spoke of what they had seen, heard and felt found comfort in being listened to. Every Moment Is a Life asks the same of its readers: to sit with these writers, to take in every detail of their loss, and to grieve with them. It is painful, but it can also be healing, the kind of “Indigenous therapy” Abulhawa found among those women. It is a book to be read, and read again.

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