Two New Videos from Batool Abu Akleen

At the age of 15, Batool Abu Akleen won the Barjeel poetry prize. Her widely lauded debut poetry collection, 48kg, published by Tenement Press, was recently listed in the Guardian's Best Recent Poetry roundup.

48kg is the current pick on the PalFest Bookshelf and we highly recommend readers get a copy before they sell out.

In the above video, filmed in Gaza just a few days ago by Ahmed al Danaf and edited by Adham Yahia, Batool reads “Judgement Day,” a poem from the collection. Gaza is once again under intense bombardment and nobody is safe.

Batool’s poems, meanwhile, have been translated into multiple languages and her interviews and readings have been shared worldwide. Her diaries have also been published by Comma Press in the collection Voices of Resistance - Diaries of Genocide.

In the video below, Batool talks about her life and work. She describes how her relationship to poetry and her approach to writing have shifted in the wake of multiple displacements and against the horrors of the ongoing genocide.

Max Porter is one of the many enthusiastic fans of Abu Akleen's work, writing of 48kg:

"One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people.

“What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing.”

You can watch the videos in full on our Youtube channel. Keep up with Batool’s work on her Instagram, and consider subscribing to the PalFest Bookshelf to get Batool’s book along with the rest of our curated selection of books.

Berlin: 'aʿmāl al-'arḍ - Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, opening 2 October

The third and final chapter of 'aʿmāl al-'arḍ - Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, opens at the Spore Initiative on 2 October 2025. Presented by Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, the exhibition is a gathering of stories across land and longing, agriculture and memory, unfolding in three chapters that develop in time.

Subtitled “Absence, Sound, and the Politics of Visibility”, this final chapter features works by Leila & Noelle Awadallah, Mohanad Smama, Duncan Campbell, Eli Wewentxu & Nicolás Jaar, Stéphanie Janaina, and Laura Esposito, Luca Rossi, Andrea De Siena, & Emily Jacir.

This chapter explores the ghostly presences, erasures, and ephemeral forms of resistance that shape Palestinian life. The contributed works engage with absence, restriction, and transformation, questioning what remains unseen, what is deliberately hidden, and how bodies, spaces, and sounds persist despite attempts to erase them. 

By focusing on sonic, material, and performative traces, this chapter highlights how memory, play, and the reappropriation of space become forms of defiance in the face of displacement and control. 

For more information on the program, and to sign up for workshops and events, visit the Spore website.

New York: ISRAEL PALESTINE ON SWEDISH TV 1958–1989, opening 10 October

ISRAEL PALESTINE ON SWEDISH TV 1958-1989 by archival film maestro Göran Hugo Olsson (The Black Power Mixtape) is assembled from a vast stockpile of striking footage catalogued in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT, where accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists.

Stories of the beginning of the Israeli state are interwoven with the Palestinian struggle for independence. News coverage with Yasser Arafat and interviews with Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban during a visit to Sweden have not been shown since the first broadcast.

From the tenth anniversary of Israel’s founding to the First Intifada, perspectives and encounters with statesmen, civilians, revolutionaries, and intellectuals tell the story from myriad angles of an evolving media landscape, revivifying a history of the conflict.

Presented at Film Forum, there will be two screenings featuring a Q&A with the director on 10 and 12 October. Find more details and get your tickets here.

Boston Palestine Film Festival, 17–26 October

The Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) will return for its 19th season this year with a selection of the best films by and about Palestinians. Screening at multiple locations across Boston, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA), The Brattle Theatre, The Coolidge Corner Theater, and Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, this year’s festival will take place from October 17 to 26.

The festival’s opening film, Thank you for Banking with Us!, screens at the MFA with Palestinian director Laila Abbas in attendance for a post-screening conversation. BPFF will close at the MFA with Happy Holidays, directed by Oscar-nominated Scandar Copti. This year’s program includes multiple premieres, including the U.S. premiere of Passing Dreams by Rashid Masharawi.

In addition to the festival’s film programming, BPFF is co-presenting two Palestinian cultural initiatives: The Lost Paintings exhibit, an imagined recreation of the last exhibition held in Palestine by Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb, opening in Boston on October 18th, and Sitti’s House to host a Knafe cooking class.

For the full program, including details, dates, times, and ticket information, visit the BPFF website.

Book of the Week

I didn’t write this to make you cry.
Not for you to tell me: “Poor you.”
I write this so I can hang these words around your neck—
to make you bear the responsibility of my perspective,
the responsibility of knowing,
the responsibility of being a witness.

Unimaginable brutalities unfold within the brief pages of Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide, as a young man recounts the story of his world, obliterated. Twenty-two-year-old Wasim Said watched as his life was cast into constant danger when the Israeli occupation began its relentless and genocidal attacks on Gaza after October 7, 2023. In the short gasps between bombardments, Wasim picked up his pen to tell the stories of the atrocities he encountered at every turn: his family scrambling for food and shelter under gunfire, friends and neighbors brutally murdered as they tried to retrieve flour and false aid, the untold stories of those martyred at hospitals, schools, homes. 

The stories are difficult to stomach. They are graphic, they are cruel, they are unbearable—just as the Israeli occupation has been since its inception. But as Wasim constantly turns to address the reader, these stories also contain a charge within them. What will you do now that you have the responsibility of knowing? What will you do now that you are a witness just like him?

Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide is out now from 1804 Books. You can order your copy at their website, and you can read a selection from Mousa Alsadah’s foreword to the book here. Said’s testimony shows, in the words of Alsadah, that “despite the magnitude of the genocide, despite Zionism’s belief that its policies would produce a society the reflects its own monstrous image, the moral fabric of Gazan society has remained remarkably intact, even as long as the genocide has continued.”

Media Roundup

So the Light Won’t Leave Me – Two poems from Nima Hasan’s new collection Ḥattā lā yatrukanī al-dawʾ, translated by Huda Fakhreddine and introduced by Rania Jawad: “Everyone is gone. Cinematically, / I wave for the light to stay, / to not leave me. / This earth has lost its way, / and still it spins and spins / on itself.” 

We Tried to Stay in Gaza City. There Are No Longer Any Means of Sustaining Life. – Rasha Abou Jalal narrates the terrifying experience of being forced to evacuate from Gaza City in north Gaza to Nuseirat in central Gaza as Israel’s tanks, troops, drones, and quadcopters closed in.

On Waiting for Things That Won’t Come – A new essay by Haidar al Ghazali, translated by Batool Abu Akleen: “Our hearts are tired out by wars. They weigh our graceful bodies. So can you fly to us, like birds or clouds? Like grief? Wouldn’t you immigrate, leave your home? Aren’t you light in the hearts to be carried by the wind? Aren’t you slim enough to run toward us like a gazelle dodging arrows and stones?”

Gaza After Midnight: Insomnia, Gunfire, and the Buzz of Drones – Ghada Abu Muaileq offers a brief social history of night in Gaza, once a time of togetherness and communal life that has become, over the past two years of genocide, a time for drones, bombs, and explosions.

Breaking the Siege on Gaza and Our Political Imaginary – Ahmed Bakr interviews Ali Kniss, currently aboard the Maghreb Sumud Flotilla, about the need to organize for Gaza against the sense of defeatism and to reignite popular political imagination in the face of an international and regional system that serves Israel’s actions.

The New McCarthyism: On Canary Mission’s Toxic Blacklisting of Pro-Palestinian Sentiment – Omar Zahzah looks at how the digital blacklisting of pro-Palestine students and faculty at universities has evolved over the past decade, arguing that it constitutes a form of “digital settler colonialism.”

Diba’s House – In this short story, Sara Masry tells of the lead-up to the Nakba, and the ways in which one Palestinian family’s neighborly hospitality to a newly-arrived Jewish family backfires.

Recognition of Palestine: Like an Arsonist Returning to the Crime Scene – Aya Talahmeh argues that Western recognition of Palestinian sovereignty is meaningless unless it affirms the Palestinian right of return and the dismantling of the settler colonial project which the West still continues to support.

European Recognition of a Palestinian State Is Not an Act of Solidarity but a Betrayal of Palestinian Liberation – Majed Abusalama asserts that Western recognition of a Palestinian state accelerates the colonization of Palestine by legitimizing the premise of Zionism and its place on Palestinian land.

Gulf Economic Normalization: A Gateway to Regional Domination – Abdulla Janahi claims, in this extended analysis of the commercial relations between Gulf states and Israel translated by Noha AbuShammala, that the economic benefits of normalization will not resolve the fiscal crises in the Gulf, and will diminish public support for these states across the Arab world and around the globe.

War Has Taken Too Much From Us – Reporting from the camps for the displaced in al-Mawasi, Hassan Herzallah profiles a number of children living with chronic illnesses who have been displaced over and over again.

A Chronicle of Loss and Unending Grief: Gaza’s Genocide and the Weight of Inherited Grief – Abdalhadi Alijla writes about having to grieve his losses in Gaza from afar, and the impossibility of mourning because, as he suggests, there are no stages of grief in Gaza.

I Don’t Start from Zero— I Return to It – A new poem from Fatena Abu Mostafa: “I no longer celebrate hope. / I just keep it close— / the way a drowning soul / clutches a piece of wood.”

Sad Nights of the North – Doha Kahlout writes, in this essay translated by Katharine Halls, about watching from afar as the Israeli military razes her hometown of Gaza City: “After a year and four months away, even the sea held the sorrow of the northern waves. “Sad nights of the north,” I repeated, “remember me, remember me.” It pained me that the north had become the past. None of us forgot its sweetness; it came to us like a breeze. I saw the displaced people gazing into the distance, their eyes fixed on a point far away that I knew was home.”

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