How one bookstall defies genocide in Gaza

As Gaza enters what global monitors warn is the “worst-case scenario of famine,” and the death toll from Israeli attacks surpasses 60,000, one question might seem absurd: Who still thinks about books?

And yet, in the middle of starvation, amid the ruins of schools and libraries, a small bookstall named Eqraa Ketabak (Read Your Book) continues to operate in Nuseirat refugee camp. 

Its founders, brothers Salah and Abdullah Sarsour, are themselves displaced — their home destroyed, now sheltering in a classroom — but still they bring books to a starving, shelled population.

“It is about sharing our passion,” Salah told The Electronic Intifada. “Not just starting a business.”

Perhaps passion is all that remains when even language begins to decay. In Gaza, a book is no longer just a book. It is a flicker of the life before. A thread of human continuity held between two trembling hands.

There is no armor in a book. But in its pages lives cultural memory — what Jan Assmann describes as a society’s means of surviving itself. In Gaza, where names are turned into numbers, books still speak them back into being. Memory is the one thing this war cannot kill.

The drones scream overhead. The bombs fall like punctuation marks on a sentence no one wants to finish. And still, memory outlives them — tucked into the spine of a borrowed novel, folded into dog-eared pages, scribbled in pencil in the margin by a child who once believed in tomorrow.

Because storytelling, even when shattered, insists on wholeness. Even when the plot is interrupted by airstrikes, even when the paper burns, the act of telling — of remembering — is resistance. 

What bullets fail to pierce, a poem preserves. What occupation tries to erase, a story sometimes smuggles back into the light.

Dr. Refaat Alareer, literature professor and father, was killed in an airstrike along with his family. His final poem, “If I Must Die,” has now been read in over 40 languages. Though his body was buried beneath rubble, his words traveled. In this way, storytelling defies fragmentation: not by avoiding rupture, but by refusing to be silenced by it. Even when the page is scorched, the story endures,  carried in the lungs of those who still dare to breathe it aloud.

Books as resistance to cultural erasure

Since October 2023, over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, and with them, thousands of untold stories. Israeli forces have targeted Gaza’s cultural infrastructure — including universities, heritage archives, art centers, and the writers themselves.

Heba Abu Nada, author of Oxygen is Not for the Dead, killed in an airstrike. Her last words: “Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets.”  Mohammad Saleh, 21, one of Gaza’s youngest published poets — now a memory. Inas al-Saqa, playwright and mother of six, killed with three of her children.

Their lives were not abstractions. Their deaths were not unfortunate accidents. They were artists. Writers. Historians. Human beings who posed a threat not because they carried weapons but because they carried memory.

And what is memory in a settler-colonial framework if not a threat to power?

But books, like their readers, resist erasure. People come to the stall not just for books, but for memory. For proof they still exist.

Israel has tried to erase a people. But literature does what missiles cannot: it remembers. And as long as there is one book left open in Gaza, the story is not over.

Literature as humanitarian aid

Airdrops miss the mark. Books do not. 

Of the 109 aid trucks allowed into Gaza this week, most were looted before reaching starving civilians. Four of six airdrops fell into Israeli-controlled areas. This is parachuted compassion — falling from the sky, disconnected from the people it claims to save. But a book doesn’t need a parachute. It can be passed hand to hand. It can be whispered. Memorized. Hidden. Shared. Survived.

Palestinian literature has always transcended walls. It travels with the refugees. It stays with the mothers who bury sons and keep telling stories so the child is not lost twice.

Literature in Gaza has never been ornamental. It has always been insurgent — a kind of breathing. “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance,” wrote Mahmoud Darwish. 

When the last school collapses, a novel becomes a syllabus. When the last teacher is martyred, a poem becomes the lesson plan. And when every map says you no longer exist — your story is your proof of life.

What a bookstall can do that a bomb cannot

Eqraa Ketabak cannot stop missiles. It cannot revive the children who die of hunger while the world debates whether genocide is really genocide. But it can do something just as urgent: help people remember who they are.

While genocide denial cloaks itself in diplomacy, this bookstall gathers memory from the ashes and keeps it breathing.

Children gather to flip through picture books, elders stop to recite old poems, and young writers come to find the words to survive. 

Despite the collapse of Gaza’s physical infrastructure, cultural production persists through digital means. Displaced novelist Amal Abu Saif wrote her book Atheer Gaza entirely on her phone’s notes app, at a time when paper was too scarce to waste. The novel was published this year across the Arab world.

“This book stall has become my priority destination,” she said, “the only place that makes me feel my old self again.”

Israel has already destroyed more than 13 public libraries, countless schools, and universities. It has bombed lecture halls and killed professors. The attack on Gaza aims to annihilate not only lives but the very memory of life.

But as Hassan al-Qatrawi, a novelist and frequent visitor to the stall, writes: “They destroy us from the outside, and we build ourselves from within. The hunger for food is temporary. But the hunger for reading is eternal.”

In Gaza, even hunger is political. While food is blocked at borders and aid trucks are looted, stories still find a way through. Food may feed the body, but a book feeds the will to stay human. As missiles flatten classrooms and breadlines grow longer, Eqraa Ketabak offers something just as essential: memory.