Memories of Diminishment
Yesterday, we had a conversation with Samar Yazbek. Today, a review of her book.
Memories of Diminishment
On Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza
By Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
“The people of Gaza don’t need our pity, but our acknowledgement of their bravery, their dignity and their rights, and their urgent wish to disclose the truth of their tragedy.”
—Samar Yazbek
How does one review a book of this sort? Well, let me tell you something: this review almost didn’t happen.
As I read the last testimony of the “survivors,” the twisted hands of Namtar clasped around my heart and dragged me down to Irkalla, the underworld realm of Ereshkigal. Oxygen seemed to disappear from the room, and I had an urge to open the window, to exhale the venom filling my chest, to yell at passersby, “How could you let this happen? Why didn’t you stop it? How could you? How?”
Then my own good intentions, the ones said to pave the way to hell, seized me by the jaw and wrenched my head around, forcing me to look toward my own reflection in the abyss: I, too, have been watching for more than two years, the livestreamed chopping and burning of flesh, and didn’t stop it; only allowed the walls inside my skull to turn into a museum of barbarism. No guided tours.
Just as I was about to beg Ereshkigal for atonement, the velvety voice of Toni Morrison rang across the dungeon.
“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.”
Her voice recalled the words of Samar Yazbek, still fresh in my recent memory, here in Leri Price’s deeply resonant translation. The words scrolled upward in front of my mind’s eye:
“Now, precisely, language needs to bend beneath this rope pulled taut over our souls, a rope which overwhelms the mind’s capacity to fathom the curses that have settled over our countries.”
Neti unbolted the seven gates of Irkalla. I was back at my desk, breathing again.
***
On that desk lay Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza by Samar Yazbek, a title that rode on Israeli warning leaflets airdropped over Gaza, commanding evacuation—or else.
During her stay in Doha, in the smoldering summer of 2024, Samar Yazbek collected dozens of testimonies narrated by Gazans who, miraculously, had escaped an ongoing genocide, despite their shrunken lives and irreversibly diminished bodies. Yazbek had not arrived in Qatar intending to document Gaza: she had travelled there to care for her daughter after a serious riding accident. But after October 7, 2023, when wounded Gazans began arriving in Doha for treatment, she volunteered at al-Thumama Complex, a site built to host football fans during the 2022 World Cup and then repurposed as an emergency shelter.
“There, survivors of the Gazan genocide were gathered; people with amputated limbs in complex and critical states of health,” writes Yazbek. “Together with the family members caring for them, they numbered more than 2,500.” She recalls how, upon seeing them, she was suddenly struck by a chain of troubling questions:
“Is it even right that we consider them survivors? Where does human pain go when justice is absent?”
***
Yazbek is no stranger to war journalism. While known primarily as a novelist, she has dedicated much of the last decade to documenting atrocities, particularly in her home country, before any archival dust settled on them. Since 2011, she has written and published multiple books documenting the Syrian tragedy, paying special attention to its effect on the lives of women, in an attempt to secure a spot in humanity’s collective memory: A Woman in the Crossfire (tr. Max Weiss), The Crossing (tr. Nashwa Nasreldin and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), and 19 Women.
When she began collecting testimonies for her book on Gaza, she initially planned to “focus solely on women, but with time, and after seeing the numbers of children and teenagers, I decided to meet with as many people as possible and to make a selection.”
Still, in her conversations with women, she noticed something. “Women would tell me about rape and harassment that had happened to other women.” By contrast, “when it came to their own experiences, the women would deny having been personally subject to any such abuse.” Yazbek attributes the women’s reserve to social surveillance in Gaza’s conservative society. But it is also important to note how this is another example of the double-bind in which colonized indigenous women often find themselves, as they face colonial gendered violence that weaponizes their bodies and the prevalent patriarchy in their own society. It would be impossible to imagine a raped Palestinian woman reporting on her sexual abuse to the authorities actively engaged in annihilating her family – and herself.
***
Speaking to the Gazan survivors in Doha, Yazbek almost instantly noticed a pattern. “Those phantoms embodied a recurring symbol of humanity’s defeat, as if Palestinians had become Syrians and Syrians Palestinians, across a shared space of brutality that I have witnessed, written about and buried in my heart.”
Yet despite the many similarities, Yazbek points out one “novel detail” that stood out to her in the testimonies, one that she never encountered throughout her work in the Syrian context. Namely, it was “the unleashing of algorithms of murder, the use of artificial intelligence to kill,” in the form of what Gazans described as zannanat (drones) and quadcopters, able to “enter houses, bedrooms, stop over children’s heads, issue instructions, shoot in the head, take iris scans, shoot in the eye, accompany the lines of those who are displaced and escaping bombardment and forced to leave their homes, remaining above their heads to compel them to flee.”
Horrific as it is, the need for a human to decide who should die when, where, and how—a human with all their complexities, hesitations, and conflicting moral values—can now be removed altogether from the murder equation. “Palestinians have become merely undesirable data,” Yazbek concludes, and, in this moment, she alerts us to the bleak future that awaits, now that this has been allowed to happen in the open-air prison of Gaza.
The testimonies further corroborate what international organizations have been reporting for more than two years on AI-assisted targeting in Gaza. One harrowing account comes from 22-year-old Shaimaa Naji, who narrates her encounter with one of those killing machines on October 22, 2023.
“[I] went out onto the balcony to get some fresh air, only to be surprised to find a zannana right in front of me. It was watching us. At first I thought that it was a missile fired remotely and it occurred to me to take a picture, but I suddenly noticed it was a reconnaissance drone, and it had in fact been taking pictures of us. I hurried back inside, heavy-hearted. Before long, we heard it shoot. We realized later that it was scoping the place out. My father was a target. These drones, quadcopters, can shoot or detonate themselves. As if murdering in person isn’t enough, they’ve brought us mechanical murder in the form of drones.”
One of the most devastating descriptions in the book comes from Abdullah Yousef Aakila, a 13-year-old boy who watched his mother burn in front of him, during what was supposed to be a civilian evacuation on an UNRWA bus in December 2023.
“Why did the zannanat bomb the bus again?” he still wonders.
“I saw my mother on fire with my own eyes. I tried to save her, but the electric door wouldn’t open. The driver escaped and I wasn’t able to open the door. My uncle threw his son out of the window, and I survived because my uncle eventually managed to get the door open, but the missile had fallen right on my mother and my sister and they burned, they were in the part where the missile landed.”
***
Yet treating Gaza as a lab for sophisticated warfare did not end with AI and autonomous weapons. Many testimonies attest to the introduction of new weapons and chemicals.
Take, for example, the testimony of Israa Muhanna, a 33-year-old mother of three, who knew immediately that she had been exposed to a new toxin. “I threw up black gunpowder, and I saw awful things coming out of my insides. I don’t know what poisons they bombed us with, but I was determined to live and I threw all of them up.”
Despite her own injuries, 33-year-old Huda Sufyan Saeed al-Baghdady recalls the horrific injuries she saw on another survivor, Iman Mussalim. “I remember her and her name because what I witnessed on her I had never seen in my life. Her right hand had a hole in it, a circular hole as though a sharp tool had cut out a piece of her palm. Her legs too. In fact, her whole body was gouged with circles and semicircles. It was so strange. What kind of weapon was this, that acted like a mouse gnawing the sides of a bread roll?”
***
The testimonies also provide ample proof of yet another macabre detail: the theft of body parts from corpses.
Ibrahim Qudaih, a 22-year-old nursing student from Khan Younis who lost his limbs, still wonders about where his limbs might have ended up. “It seems impossible that I ever will know – after the army of occupation destroyed the hospitals, it headed to the graveyards and dug them up and took the bodies. They destroyed any hope I had of visiting the buried half of my body.”
Another gruesome account comes from Jihan Bakry, a 30-year-old mother who lost her home, her husband, her two children, and her leg. “People said that the Israeli soldiers were tearing up people’s graves and taking out their bodies, and they dug up my children’s graves and stole their bodies. Alhamdulillah, they left my husband’s grave as it is, but they had no mercy on the graves of my children.”
Quite literally, no place in Gaza is safe; not even the grave.
***
While narrating death and destruction, the witnesses Yazbek spoke with still found a way to illustrate that, in the words of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, they taught life. Many insisted on showing Yazbek pictures of their families and of themselves when their bodies were still whole; some entrusted her with a list of names of the people they lost; they defied erasure by every means available to them.
Each of these 27 testimonies, even those by younger witnesses who have lived their entire lives under siege and consecutive Israeli military assaults, is further proof the people of Gaza want to live—a shocking statement to a world so accustomed to the dominant Israeli narrative, which claims that Gaza fosters a culture of death. If anything, the testimonies illustrate beyond doubt that death and destruction are, and always have been, imposed on Gazans by a world that seeks to dehumanize them in every way imaginable.
“We have lived under siege for a quarter of a century… We were carrying on as if we were going to live forever, but we knew we might die at any moment… We are human and we want to live, we have children and we want them to live.”
—Samir al-Agha, age 54
“All I wanted, like other Palestinians, was to live in safety… War was a background to our lives; I have lived through perhaps four of them. But those were wars where the bombing came in instalments, death and destruction came unhurriedly. They weren’t genocide.”
—Nada Eisa Ayyash, age 40
“All I could think of was my children, I wanted them to survive and to live.”
—Hajir Abu Samaan, age 30
“When my brother’s wife woke up and saw her daughter next to her, she said, ‘We will not be finished, we are going to live.’”
—Jihan Bakry, age 30
“I love swimming, I used to swim twice a week. I wonder now, can I swim with one leg?”
—Bara Hamada, age 17
“I think about my school, I think about the large painting I made and hung in my room – it burned down with the house, of course. I think about my pens and notebooks and the things I wrote, my paints and paintbrushes. I imagine it – I wonder how my paintbrushes burned?”
—Muhannad Radwan, age 15
***
I first read the book in its original Arabic, when it bore the searing title ذاكرة النقصان (A Memory of Diminishment), a phrase that evokes erosion of bodies, homes, even life itself. Only afterward did I turn to the English edition, where Leri Price’s translation carries the weight of and preserves the full force of the testimonies. Reading the two versions in sequence made the precision of Price’s work unmistakable.
The book begins with two introductions: one that accompanied the Arabic edition, written in September 2024, and a second written in November 2025 in preparation for the release of the English edition. Between the two intros, one can trace a shift in Yazbek’s approach, from “venerating the personal and the subjective” to the pursuit of an answer to a question that originated in bell hooks’ view that the personal is political: “Was I right to record these testimonies?” There’s a change in Yazbek’s authorial mood, from careful hope to disappointment, moving from “we must rebuild the world with words, so that perhaps one day, the justice that has been so ardently pursued can finally be realized” to a bleaker, disillusioned tone, after seeing how a livestreamed genocide for two years and counting has been met with virtually no accountability: “perhaps I have done nothing but add a black stain to human history. A stain of words… the words of the people of Gaza.”
However, Yazbek’s collection of testimonies, spanning the shattered lives of children as young as thirteen to the weary wisdom of the elderly, refutes the diminishment intended by the airdropped leaflets. If the leaflets claim their presence is a danger, Yazbek proves their erasure is the true catastrophe.
You can pre-order Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, which is set for a UK release in May and US release in August 2026. Also read our conversation with Samar Yazbek.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a writer, editor, translator, and poet. She is the translator and co-editor of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan (2015) and the English translator of Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017). Her essays, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Markaz Review, New Internationalist, Qantara, The Seattle Globalist, and Women Writers, Women’s Books. Her poetry and literary translations have been featured in international anthologies, including The Art of Being Human (2013), Premio Mondiale di Poesia Nosside (2014), and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (2025). She is a contributing editor at ArabLit. She also publishes the Substack newsletter Naked Shadows on a Black Wall.