From the PalFest Bookshelf

48Kg. by Batool Abu Akleen

Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg. is now available in a bi-lingual Arabic and English edition from Tenement Press.

Abu Akleen’s debut collection is made up of forty eight poems, each accounting for a single kilogram.

Batool is attempting to evacuate Gaza and is currently on the French government’s evacuation list. Activists in France are running a crowdfunder to cover her expenses for two years (which is part of the French government's conditions on evacuation).

Please share with your networks and give what you can to support Batool. 

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem ‘Gunpowder’ was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salam to Gaza.’ Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translator in Residence.’ Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and—alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra and Ala’a Obaid— she is one of the four Gazan authors included in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Comma Press, 2025). 

The Martyrdom of Anas al-Sharif

In the early hours of Monday morning, Israel killed the prominent Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with his colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa. A total of seven people were martyred in a targeted Israeli attack on a tent housing journalists outside of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Anas was one of the last remaining journalists reporting from northern Gaza. Despite the credible threats that Israel had been making against him for months, Anas remained steadfast, a voice of truth committed to the freedom and dignity of his people. He was twenty-nine years old at the time of his martyrdom.

Like his colleague Hossam Shabat, martyred on March 24 of this year, Anas wrote a statement to be shared in the event of his death. It reads:

“This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

“Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabalia refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (Al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.

“I entrust you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.

“I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed.

“I entrust you with my dear son Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission.

“I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.

“I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend—patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith.

“I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty. If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting.

“O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it.

“Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.

كُتب هذا النص على معدة خاوية: مرويات من الإبادة بالتجويع - الأربعاء، 13 آب 2025

Virtual Event - Walls That See: From Occupied Jerusalem to the Global Struggle for Justice, 18 August

Join Art Forces and I Witness Silwan for an urgent and inspiring virtual gathering on August 18 that brings together artists, thinkers, and organizers to explore how art confronts injustice, from the murals of Silwan in occupied Jerusalem to the walls and stages of communities resisting oppression worldwide.

Hosted by Art Forces, this session will be guided by Noura Erakat, a Palestinian human rights attorney and Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, whose work illuminates the lived realities of Palestinian communities facing forced dispossession and ethnic cleansing as well as the shared strategies of global freedom movements.

Featured voices include acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and public scholar and freedom movement chaplain Nyle Fort. The conversation will also be joined by visual and performance artists, each sharing how their art challenges injustice and uplifts the stories that dominant narratives often seek to silence, and members of the I Witness Silwan team from Jerusalem.

Find more details and register here.

Book of the Week

We Had Mansions is a stunning collection that operates against erasure, against mis-naming and misrepresentation of a land, a people, or history. Each poem is its own beautiful reclamation, teeming with touchable imagery and the rich interior of memory, of lives that were full, and remain full.

– Hanif Abdurraqib

In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations.

These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss. With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.

We Had Mansions resists reducing Palestinians to mere symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of resistance and survival, there are odes to joy, desire, and the domestic. Here, the sacred is complex, and the mythic is recast in the light of diaspora, with every love poem also serving as a Palestine poem. With formal dexterity and unwavering moral vision, Shunnarah claims space for a voice that is too often erased, transforming rage into testimony and tenderness into resistance. This is a vital new collection from a poet of searing insight and an expansive heart.

We Had Mansions was published last month. You can get your copy from Diode Editions.

Media Roundup

​​I Want My Poem to be Like the Night – Two poems by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel: “What then, is poetry? The shadows the trees leave on the walls in the night are much closer to poetry than the novels lined up around it. It holds words, and nothing else, in its hands, and still we say it is a child of silence, not of language.” 

They Came for Food, They Found Bullets – Sumaya Mohammed profiles people injured and debilitated by the Israeli gunfire at aid distribution points, including a man who was blinded by gunfire and who is not being allowed out of Gaza for treatment. 

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: Aid as a Weapon – Yara Asi, Alex Feagans, and Tariq Kenney-Shawa discuss how the GHF fits into Israel’s genocidal strategy as a tool for forced displacement, coercion, and control.

Rashid Khalidi on Genocide Complicity, From Columbia to the White House – Sharif Abdel Kouddous speaks to Rashid Khalidi about the anti-colonial struggle against Israel, U.S. and European complicity in the genocide and the anti-Palestinian conditions in higher education.

The War Without End in Gaza – “More than a war over territory,” Abdaljawad Omar writes, “the assault on Gaza is a war over the capacity to extend, suspend, and dictate the tempo of killing, destruction, and the planned concentration of Palestinians into the dystopian ‘humanitarian’ city in Rafah.” 

On Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48Kg’ – Hilary Plum reviews Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg., noting that the poet’s “preternatural intimacy with death” suspends the subjects of her writing between futility and fortitude, and affording her poetic labor an urgent gravity.

A History of Israel’s Military Occupations of Gaza – Seraj Assi offers a brief history of Israel’s involvement in Gaza, beginning with the quarter million refugees it drove into Gaza through the Nakba, and then continuing with “massacre after massacre” for more than seven decades.

Hunger Makes Life Hell for Gaza’s Journalists – Eman Hillis, a journalist in Gaza, shares how starvation has disrupted every aspect of her professional and personal life.

‘We Support Palestine Action in Their Campaign Against Proscription’ – An open letter from some of the world's leading thinkers calling on the UK government to drop the charges against Palestine Action.

Starvation as a Weapon: Gaza’s Slow Death Under Siege – Izzedin Shahin tells Eman Basher about the ripple effects of starvation across the social fabric, as for instance in the healthcare sector, where patients cannot heal, and doctors and nurses are collapsing; he ends with a plea for the international community to disarm the weapon of starvation.  

Instead of Sanctioning Israel, the West Is Retreating Into the Fantasy of a 'Virtual State' – Soumaya Ghannoushi lambasts the symbolic overtures that certain governments in the west are now making toward recognizing a Palestinian state, showing how these gestures provide additional cover for Israel’s war crimes.

The Statehood Trap – Comparing the symbolic gestures of recognizing Palestinian statehood now to the follies of the Oslo Accords, Noura Erakat and Shahd Hammouri argue that “the recognition of Palestine is not the missing bridge between the genocidal present and a sustainable future.”

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