The Electronic Intifada Podcast 10 September 2025
She joined editors James Harker and Basma Ghalayini to talk about their new book, Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide, a collection of first-person accounts and diaries from four Gaza-based writers, including Abu Akleen.
The other three poets featured are Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana and Ala’a Obaid.
The book chronicles the genocide from October 2023 to March 2025, and documents Israel’s engineered collapse of Gaza’s society and infrastructure, the nightmare of repeated forced displacements and the terror of Israeli attacks, but also, as the publisher Comma Press says, “the everyday defiance of Palestinians.”
Abu Akleen is a student of English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, where she studied under Dr. Refaat Alareer who was killed by Israel in December 2023. The university itself was one of the first educational institutions to be destroyed in the genocide.
When she learned that Alareer had been murdered, Abu Akleen was devastated.
“I kept just asking myself, what’s the purpose of writing? He kept writing, and he kept telling the truth, but all of that didn’t protect him, and this doesn’t even protect anyone – it just puts us more in danger,” she says.
She added that she thinks a lot about what she does and what she writes.
“I know I’m putting maybe myself in danger, and my family and even Basma [Ghalayini], James [Harker] and [co-editor] Ra [Page] and Comma Press and everyone that published my writing, all of them are just putting themselves in danger” by publishing and supporting her work.
“Basically, I feel [that] I’ve turned into another missile that might explode and harm people around me.”
At 15 years old, Abu Akleen won the Parjeel Poetry Prize for her poem “I Did Not Steal the Cloud,” which was also translated and published as part of the Italian anthology Di acqua e di tempo.
She has had poems published in anthologies, and extracts of her diaries have been performed at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England.
Abu Akleen reads us one of her poems, “Gunpowder,” which won third place in the 2025 London Magazine Poetry Prize.
Her own book of poems, 48kg, was published earlier this year.
“Complete awe”
Basma Ghalayini, who grew up in Gaza, tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast that when she first read Abu Akleen’s work, she was in “complete awe.”
“It was unbelievable how I was reading it and thinking that as unrelatable as the situation in Gaza is, no one would struggle to relate to those emotions,” she says.
James Harker, a playwright, says that when people come to see stage readings from the book, “and they have to sit down and listen and hear these words without being able to look away,” the impact can be profound.
“Perhaps the perspective and the relatability of Batool’s work – and just the way she talks about her life – is a way to connect to different people and to give them an understanding of the nature of the oppression, but also the richness of the humanity that all the writers capture different facets of.”
Harker reads from Sondos Sabra’s work as well, from a section where she describes Israel’s murder of her nieces and nephews:
Of course, they don’t intend to kill us, even when they drop 2,000-pound bombs on us, even when they rain down bombardments across entire neighborhoods and make life impossible in our city.
No, don’t misunderstand, they are merely eradicating terrorism. Two days ago, terrorism was hiding in the body of Omar, my six-year-old nephew, perhaps in his heart or maybe among his soft locks of hair. So they killed him. They dropped two missiles on him and his siblings, Ayah and Ahmed and his niece, Sila, who was only seven months old, killing them all.
Who knows, perhaps terrorism hides in the warmth of a home, in the bells of churches or the minarets of mosques, between the pages in the books, at the streets and alleyways of the camps, or amidst the tents of the displaced. The Israeli occupation has every right to erase anything from the face of the earth, if they so desire. And no one has the right to criticize Israel. After all, they are saving humanity from the evildoers. How valiant of them. How noble.
Watch the entire episode via YouTube, or via Apple Podcasts or the SoundCloud player below.
Produced by Tamara Nassar
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