Israeli air attacks across the Gaza Strip, in the week beginning 17 March 2025, killed more than 300 Palestinians, including women and children.
Sean Sheehan
As one of the newsreaders on Novara Media put it, the months-long ceasefire means Hamas ceases while the Israelis fire and maintain a blockage that denies food and medical supplies to those struggling to stay alive there. It is what makes “Eyes on Gaza: witnessing annihilation” an urgent publication.
In the first of the book’s essays, the author Khaled Beydoun references the unforgettable 1966 film “The battle of Algiers” (freely available to watch online).
Depicting the Algerian uprising against French colonial rule, the film uses mostly amateur actors to uncannily recreate the asymmetrical nature of the fighting.
It also shows the barbarism of colonial rule that led to political and military defiance. One day, a film like it will be made about the war in Gaza and it will show how, as Beydoun explains, “lawfare typically precedes warfare”. The use of law to deny self-government and label as ‘terrorism’ the right to resist is as true of Palestine as it was for Algeria but it does not stop mainstream media parroting the question “Do you support Hamas?” without also asking “Do you support Israeli terrorism?”
The genocide in Gaza is televised and brought to us in real time but this does not change the situation.
Instead, it leaves sentient viewers in a state of helpless despair ‘bound, psychologically and existentially to an indelible shock to the conscience’. Beydoun goes on, rightly, to describe us being trapped in a digital world ‘within a new world order where scrolling past death is a routine part of our absurd new life.’ An uncomfortable aspect of this entrapment is the way it results from a genocide being carried out by an Israeli government democratically elected by the citizens of that country, just like those of the US, the UK and other states that unwaveringly support Israel.
“Eyes on Gaza” is more than a book of words. It is accompanied on virtually every other page by outstanding artwork from the Palestinian political cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh.
His images are as hauntingly painful to contemplate as the stories told in the book about Sheikh Khaled Nabhan, killed in December 2024 by the Israelis, and the photojournalist Motaz Azaiza who was lucky not to have been killed as he went about showing the world what CNN and the BBC preferred to avoid broadcasting.
Beydoun’s concluding words live on: “Gaza did sink. It sinks deep into our souls. Rising sublime action, rooting new champions and rotting old dogmas. It sinks deep in pages of brave new histories and bolder generations that affirm, through written word and marching action that Gaza endures. We can never unseen what is within. Gaza has sunk into all of us.”
“Eyes on Gaza: witnessing annihilation” by Khaled A. Beydoun, with art by Mohammad Sabaaneh, is published by Street Noise Books.
(Images provided by the publisher)
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