These poems are excerpted from Feisal G. Mohamed’s work in progress Nowhere is Safe in Gaza, a book-length erasure of South Africa’s December 2023 application to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with violations of the Genocide Convention.
an apartheid regime
an apartheid regime
discriminatory land zoning and planning
punitive and administrative house demolitions Israeli army incursions into
Palestinian
villages towns cities refugee camps routine violent Israeli raids on their
homes arbitrary arrests indefinitely renewable administrative detention
Palestinians
without basic protections
Israeli settlers
with full due process
WCNSF
hundreds of multigenerational families have been killed
in their entirety with no remaining survivors mothers fathers children siblings grandparents aunts
cousins often all killed together
medics in Gaza have had to coin a new
acronym ‘WCNSF’ meaning ‘wounded child no surviving family’
‘I have never seen such a thing before’
Israeli bulldozers excavated and exhumed a hospital
mass grave in the besieged Kamal Adwan hospital on 16 December where 26 Palestinians had been
buried Hossam Abu Safiya Head of Pediatric Services
stated “[t]he soldiers dug up the graves this morning and dragged the bodies with bulldozers
then crushed the bodies with the bulldozers I have never seen such a thing before”
Feisal G. Mohamed is professor of English at Yale University. His latest book is Sovereignty (2020).
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