Don't look left : a diary of genocide

Summary/Review: "Early in the morning of Oct 7, 2023, Atef Abu Saif went swimming. It was a beautiful morning: sunny with a cool breeze. The Palestinian Authority's Minister for Culture, he was on a combined work and pleasure trip to Gaza, visiting his extended family with his 15 year old son, Yasser, and participating in National Heritage Day. Then the bombing started. Don't Look Left takes us into the day to day experiences of Gazan civilians trying to survive Israel's war against Hamas, its detail and extended narrative showing us what brief reports and video clips cannot. In a war that has taken an extraordinarily high toll on civilians, it is a crucial document--a day-to-day testimony and a deeply moving depiction of a people's fight to survive and maintain their humanity amid the chaos and trauma of mass destruction. It is also, remarkably, a powerful literary experience. Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza in 1973, and, as he writes, his first war broke out when he was two months old. He writes as only someone who knows Gaza deeply can, and only as someone who knows war can, picking out the details of ordinary life and survival amidst the possibility of death coming at any moment. A harrowing and indispensable first-hand account of the experience of the first 85 days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, from a prominent Palestinian writer."--