Gaza’s poetry bears witness to the world’s silence

There is a gifted young Gazan poet and translator named Mohammed Abu Lebda. Still in his twenties, he first reached out to me around two years ago and, since then, has continued to send fragments from his shattered world.

One evening, through WhatsApp, he shared videos of the ruins where his home once stood. A bomb had destroyed the house beside his family’s, forcing them to flee. Watching the images, I could hardly breathe.

After hearing Mohammed’s voice and witnessing the hardship surrounding him, I felt obliged to tell his story. Each day brought a new fear. Like so many others, he had lost his shelter and was weakened by illness that was made worse by deprivation. He was left with no tent that kept out the rain, no privacy, and no steady access to medicine.

One evening, around six o’clock, he sent me a series of alarming messages. I was in my apartment in Florida, standing by the kitchen counter, frozen following his voice notes and video footage. The contrast was unbearable: my quiet, secure space and his precarious existence.

I stood in silence, torn between helplessness and responsibility. That same month, I wrote.

Why Care About Gaza?

Because you did not have to run out to hunt
for a spare tent in the middle of the night
chest-constricted and frantic

Because you and your family
were not obliterated
by the raining bombs

Demolishing your home
snatching your childhood memories
replacing them with the unholy stench

of burning human flesh.

There were many details I could not bring myself to write about, unbearable things that still remain with me. I wanted, at the very least, to place side by side our security and their peril. Such contrast was unbearable, and I hoped the pairing might stir readers from numbness, and awaken their mercy.

How would it feel to live like Mohammed, without cause or reprieve, while the world looked on for months, for years, for generations?

I wanted readers of this poem to feel pity, compassion, outrage.

Over 75,000 Palestinians have been killed. Nearly two million people, more than four-fifths of Gaza’s population, have been displaced. Whole neighborhoods lie in rubble: schools, hospitals, mosques, churches. This is the devastation Mohammed described when speaking of his family’s flight.

Numbers cannot contain this loss; they hide faces and extinguish stories. Each statistic masks a life, with its own laughter, its own remembered light.

Bearing witness

Writing about the burning flesh felt impossible. I hesitated before setting it down, knowing its brutality. Yet to omit it would have been an injustice. To speak of Gaza in softened language would be another kind of erasure.

After all, that is the smell now in the streets where children once played, and poetry cannot wash it away.

Poems are small vessels, they cannot halt bombs or open borders, yet they preserve the trace of conscience. They bear witness: we saw, we heard, and we refused silence.

When I am asked why I write about Gaza, I recall Thomas Merton’s warning that to fall quiet before cruelty is to side with it, for silence can wound as surely as speech can heal.

I wrote from a place of fracture, between the safety of my life in the US, whose power underwrites this war, and Mohammed’s uncertain existence amid the ruins. That distance became unbearable. It compelled me to write, to seek some coherence between comfort and catastrophe.

Early in our correspondence, Mohammed sent words that have always stayed with me, a mingling of gratitude and urgency.

‘I read your poems and this is why I followed you here. Thank you, because you didn’t choose hell. I believe in what Dante Alighieri said in the Divine Comedy: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in the times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.’

His raw testimony haunted me. Despair mixed with clarity. If his lived reality demanded poetry from me, his own poems demanded that I help them reach the world.

“For me,” he confided, “I can’t write what I’m living, because no words can describe it. I’m a survivor of five wars, and I never witnessed such fear. Death here lost its value, because death value depends on its rarity, and we here facing it every day. I believe that poetry can’t describe that."

Foreword

Poets are our conscience, reminding us of our higher allegiances to one another. I believe that what poetry can offer is more enduring than news. With Palestine under siege, in the midst of relentless destruction, Mohammed’s work becomes a form of spiritual journalism. He offers a report on the state of our souls; for the living and the dead, his lines are a “Voice of the Lost Souls.”

He is a witness to our shameful historical moment, holding up a mirror to reflect our crimes: collective punishment, occupation, and worse.

What moves me most about his work is the mystical aspect that addresses our shared humanity, as well as his questing philosophical spirit. In his poem To Be a Gazan, this spiritual dimension speaks of miracles every Gazan is expected to perform: staying alive against all odds, while keeping their hearts free of hatred towards those who seek their annihilation.

“Every soul in Gaza is a Christ,
bearing others’ sins,
judged for their shortcomings
without complaint,
performing miracles,
walking on water,
yet drowning on dry land…”

He reminds us that to turn away from another’s humiliation is to injure our own humanity.

The sorrow of his lines, their hard-won wisdom and intimacy with death, are why I continue to share his work wherever I can. I regard Mohammed as a necessary voice, one speaking what many cannot, revealing the wounds of our age, and bearing witness to what history itself must one day confront.

Yahia Lababidi is the author of twelve books, including Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024) and What Remains To Be Said (Wild Goose, 2025). His writing has appeared in The New Statesman, The New Arab, Liberties, Salmagundi, World Literature Today, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in The Threepenny Review.

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