Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta’s kindergarten class.

Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta and her family were first displaced just four days into the war, on October 11, 2023. She told me, “They bombed our neighborhood in Khan Younis, so we evacuated to a nearby school that had been converted into a shelter. We were thinking the school would be safer than our home because it was under UN control. But after we were there for a month, they bombed the building next to the school. It was 6 a.m.; I awoke covered by glass shards because the blast broke the window beside me.”

Everyone fled the school. Donya and her family went to stay at a friend’s place. The next day, however, that apartment block was bombed, so, with nowhere else to go, they returned to the school. With bombs continuing to strike in and around the school grounds every day, Donya says, “We were forced to evacuate again, this time to another city, Rafah. But I felt like a part of my heart was still in Khan Younis.”

“The first thing I did in Rafah was to write my first article of the war, titled ‘We Died Four Times but We Are Still Alive.’ With that, I mean that we were targeted four times and survived, but we don’t want this survival after living a nightmare.”

“In Rafah,” she said, “we went to our aunt’s house and then set up our tent in Al Shaboura camp. At my aunt’s, we had good internet for the first time since the start of the war. It was the sixth of December. I remember that date—exactly—because when I checked the news, I learned the worst thing possible: that Dr. Refaat Alareer had been killed by the Israelis.”

A professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Alareer had taught and inspired a generation of young writers, not only in his classroom but throughout Palestine. Donya participated in a project he started called We Are Not Numbers, in which experienced authors around the world worked with young writers in Gaza. She said, “I was not at his university but he taught me so much. When I heard the news that he’d been killed, I promised myself that I would continue doing the kind of work that Dr. Refaat had started. I would keep writing.”

For almost two years, several outlets, including The Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Drop Site News, have been publishing Donya’s on-the-scene accounts of people’s everyday struggles under Israel’s unrelenting assault. In her poetry—which includes a book and a book-in-progress—she expresses the inexpressible realities of life under genocide.

Here, you can hear her read one of her poems,........

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