'This boy has never left my head' - haunting stories from the survivors of Gaza

Gaza has dropped from the headlines, as new conflicts take hold across the world, but Syrian writer Samar Yazbek does not want the world to forget the atrocities enacted on the Palestinian people.

Her latest book, Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza, is a compilation of testimonies from survivors in Gaza. Of the hundreds of survivors from Palestine's Gaza Strip, she selected twenty-six stories of ordinary people - all of which were unarmed civilians - about 7th October 2023 and the genocide that came after.

These are the stories of ordinary people. Mothers. Doctors. Teenagers. Pensioners.

I want the voices of the survivors and victims to be heard truly heard," Yazbek tells The Mirror. I want the world to know their stories: who these people were, what they lost, the homes they were driven from, the family members they buried, the parts of themselves they will never get back.

In the introduction, she describes the people of Gaza as having passed through hell and returned. Their stories, in their own words, are reproduced so the world cannot forget, cannot look away.

Hauntingly, the book's title - 'Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life' - is a quote from a flyer that was dropped into Gaza by the IDF. A terrifying warning minutes before a bomb landed.

Yazbek is no stranger to conflict zones; she was part of the uprising against the Assad regime in 2011, and was forced into exile shortly after. In 2024, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reported the atrocities in Syria, the killing of at least 202,000 civilians at the hands of Bashar Assads regime forces.

Her award-winning work has focused on untold stories from conflict zones. In 2024, in Qatars city of Doha, Yazbek approached a government building where people with amputated limbs in complex and critical states of health gathered with their families.These were the survivors from Gaza, alongside their families.

She estimates that there were 2,500 of them there that day. This horror was unbearable" she says. "I felt as though I were standing on the set of a science fiction horror film.

It felt as though the entire world had collapsed into catastrophe, as though all of humanity had been wiped away before my eyes. We have no right to turn away from the pain of others, she added.

So began hours and hours of interviews, which became Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life. Yazbek hopes this book will bring some of the worlds attention back to Gaza.

The experiences told to her have stayed with her, haunting her thoughts. She tells The Mirror about thirteen year old Abdullah, who spoke with a strange and terrible wisdom. He told her that he was born into war and grew up under siege. He said he was born a man.

This boy has never left my head. I think about him constantly. His existence felt like an indictment of all of us, of everything we have allowed to happen.

In Abdullah's own words, his testimony reads: "There aren't any children in Gaza, we grow old before our time." On December 4, 2023, a bomb hit a bus him and his family were travelling on to flee Gaza. Of this, he said: "What I remember, clearly, is that the bombing never stopped. We lived under this constant fear."

"It wasn't just one bomb that landed on us, but several. Everyone burned, my uncles, my mother, my whole family... I thought it was a nightmare and I wanted to wake up, but it wasn't". Four of his family members died in the attack, including his mother and his sister. Afterwards, Abdullah comforted his six year old brother, telling him "it's just a game".

There is also gendered suffering caused by war too. Women told Yazbek of a lack of sanitary products. She said: The complete disappearance of sanitary products across Gaza left them physically vulnerable to infection and psychologically ground down in ways that compounded everything else they were already enduring.

There was no healthcare for their bodies, at any level. The menstrual cycle became yet another source of pain layered onto all the others.

In a horrifying testimony, Nada Eisa Ayyaash recounted to Yazbek an attack that caused her periods to stop. Her testimony in the book details a bomb attack in which her family disappeared in the blink of an eye, and that her husband buried twenty-five of his family members. All the while the bombs never stopped.

In the aftermath, she experienced persistent vaginal bleeding. Doctors were not able to tell her the cause. Her testimony recounted in the book reads: The poisons and chemicals dropped onto us were causing strange symptoms. It wasnt just blood, I would see fleshy, bloody lumps coming out of me. I would feel something inside my abdomen detach and then come out, and after that my periods stopped.

Of this, Yazbek says: What made Nada's courage so striking was precisely that her willingness to speak openly about vaginal bleeding, about what was happening to her body. I verified that many other women had experienced the same, including girls between the ages of six and seventeen. And yet, in Arab society, speaking about these things is still treated as shameful.

In 2025, the United Nations released a report that concluded that sexual and gender-based violence which has risen in frequency and severity is being perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a strategy of war for Israel to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people.

Yazbek explained the difficulties for Gazan women in talking about these instances of violence.

When a woman speaks out about sexual abuse, her community rarely views her as a victim. Instead, she is seen as guilty as someone complicit in what was done to her" she says. "This perception brings deep shame upon her. Because women fear this social stigma, their silence becomes an act of self-protection.

The writer added that the killing in Gaza has not stopped. The news of other wars between Iran, America and Israel has overridden the Gazan news. Each new war arrives to eclipse the last one.

Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza by Samar Yazbek is out now.

Love reading? Join Dr. Aime Walsh and our community of fellow readers in the Mirror Book Club to dive deeper into the books everyone is talking about.

[Google Preferred Source Badge]Follow Daily Mirror: