‘Welcome to Hell:’ On Mohammad Sabaaneh’s Latest Graphic Novel

‘Welcome to Hell:’ On Mohammad Sabaaneh’s Graphic Novel

by Nada Hodali

 

“This is not just a story of prisons. It is a story of power, resistance, and the relentless fight for freedom.”

—Mohammad Sabaaneh

Since 2002, the Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh has been building a visual archive of Palestinian resistance. His work, deeply influenced by Naji Al-Ali, moves between stark political testimony and intimate human portraiture. From White and Black (Just World Books, 2017), depicting the suffering of Palestinian political prisoners, to Power Born of Dreams (Street Noise Books, 2021), a meditation on life under Israeli occupation and the humanity of Palestinians, Sabaaneh has consistently returned to a central question on how to render suffering without surrendering dignity. His recent works—30 Seconds from Gaza (Interlink, 2025) and Eyes on Gaza: Witnessing Annihilation (Street Noise Books, 2025)—push that inquiry further as he chronicles the immediacy of war in Palestine through black, white, and gray linocut cartoons, in a visual language stripped to its essentials.

That language is carved, quite literally, into being. Sabaaneh’s linocut technique—cutting away light to leave only the stark insistence of black—produces high-contrast lines that function as a political and aesthetic statement in themselves. Much like the effect of Naji Al-Ali’s ink caricatures, Sabaaneh’s use of linocut makes his imagery stand out, further intensifying the stories at hand.

With Welcome to Hell: From the West Bank to Gaza (Street Noise Books, May 2026), Sabaaneh extends that formal commitment further. Drawing on storytelling and the fractured geometry of Cubism, he chronicles the recent horrific days in Palestine, depicting stories of individuals living in the West Bank and Gaza. Cubism, historically tied to rupture and revolt, becomes here a language of occupation. The rough cuts of linoleum which create the cubist figures can be viewed as a portrait of Palestinians: how the reality we live in has shaped us, placed us into clear-cut molds of what we are allowed and not allowed to do under occupation.

By breaking down the body into geometric fragments, the cubist style perfectly captures the lived reality of Palestinians and the core message of this narrative. It fully illuminates the psychological experience of the occupation and its effects on Palestinians as a whole. The visual tension caused by cubism showcases the urgency of the situation at hand.

The title itself is no less deliberate. Flipping through these pages takes me back to B’Tselem’s report “Welcome to Hell,” which documents the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps since October 7. The title is loaded, much like the prison system has been loaded with acts of torture that befell Palestinian prisoners during the war and long before it. The moment the war began in Gaza, the West Bank was not left unaffected. Initially, checkpoints only divided major cities. Now, they slice through the landscape, separating villages and even isolating neighborhoods within the same city. You wake up to find you cannot go to school, work, or make a living because Israeli forces are raiding the area you live in. You wake up to news of losing loved ones… Our situation has always been a comparison between hard and harder, bad or worse. Sabaaneh fully contextualizes all of this in Welcome to Hell, in a way that makes you live through those stories as if you are present in the West Bank or Gaza.

Sabaaneh does this through multiple heart-wrenching perspectives. The voice shifts from his own story of commuting between cities and crossing checkpoints, to the story of Safaa in Gaza, who is praying for the safety of her brothers, to the story of a young Gazan girl who, unable to eat, draws her favorite meals instead. This is precisely what the novel’s preface promises: to “witness the stories of those who survive this oppression, their resilience a testament to the unyielding will of a people refusing to be erased.”

Moving from cartoonist to sister to daughter highlights the collective nature of the experience. Each voice documents a different angle on the same reality: life under siege and under occupation. It is most striking in the smallest moment: a girl in Gaza who draws the food she dreams of but cannot have.

At times, this shifting perspective risks thinning individual stories, moving too quickly between them to allow full immersion. Then again, this fragmentation becomes a structural echo of Palestinians’ reality, where our stories and lives are constantly interrupted, the same way the stories of each character are concise and cut short through the constant shifting of perspectives.

That accumulation of voices is where Sabaaneh’s use of hybridism takes full effect, combining brutal imagery with accompanying text to showcase how these events are rooted in daily Palestinian life, in both the West Bank and Gaza—the lack of basic amenities, hours spent at a checkpoint, the impossible calculation of saving yourself or someone else. The novel frames this, as its preface states, as “a continuation of settler-colonial logic—eliminating resistance by breaking bodies and spirits.”

Sabaaneh’s use of hybridism resists the reductive framing often imposed on Palestinian narratives. Whenever Palestinians are brought up in stories, news reports, highlighted in the media, they are always viewed from the perspective of being the ‘unfortunate’ ones or those unable to get out of their misery. Sabaaneh fully breaks that mold by showcasing individuals navigating, resisting, enduring in distinct ways. Survival itself becomes an act of defiance. Even the smallest gestures take on political significance.

The book’s publication by Street Noise Books is significant in its own right. Before October 7, Palestinian voices have struggled to find sustained visibility in Western publishing. That this work now appears with such prominence reflects how much has changed.

Critical response has been emphatic. Joe Sacco, winner of the American Book Award for Palestine, called it “an artistic triumph” and Sabaaneh “a master.” Khaled Beydoun, author of Eyes on Gaza, describes it as “chilling both visually and conceptually—this novel puts into vivid form the harrowing images of the crucible of Palestine, recalling its horrors and inspiring advocacy.”

With the presence of various voices in Sabaaneh’s novel, he managed to target different readers, from Palestinian readers to international ones. The story of him and his brother hits a chord among Palestinians, the story of Safaa further bridges the emotional gap for Western readers. For Palestinians, the novel offers a powerful sense of recognition; for Western readers, it serves as a profound introduction to the daily horrors of life under occupation. Yet the question of why Western publishers are paying attention now, when Palestinian artists have been producing work of this urgency for decades, is one the literary world has not fully reckoned with—but Welcome to Hell makes that reckoning harder to avoid.

No endorsement captures the novel’s ambition more precisely than Sacco’s own: “If Picasso’s Guernica were a graphic novel, it would look and read something like Welcome to Hell. This is one of the most important artistic statements of our time. Desperate, defiant, and never less than poetry.” Coming from the writer who redefined witness comics, this is not flattery; it is a passing of the torch.

Nada Hodali is a Palestinian literary translator working between Arabic and English. She holds degrees from Birzeit University and Durham University, BA English literature and MA Translation Studies. Committed to amplifying Arab voices, her work has appeared in journals such as ArabLit Quarterly, Mousse, and ANMLY, as well as with Interlink Publishing and TBA21. She has translated authors including Sahar Khalifeh and Najem Wali. Her recent projects include 30 Seconds from Gaza by Mohammad Sabaaneh (2025) and Safaa and the Tent by Safaa Odah (2025).

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