Since the start of the unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, carried out through settler-colonial Israeli violence, higher education institutions have been systematically destroyed. Campuses lie in ruins, academics and students have been killed or forcibly displaced, and what was once a thriving, intellectually vibrant student population now lives under daily threat of bombardment, forced starvation, and death. For nearly two years, students have been cut off not only from their universities, but from their dreams, their futures, and even their most basic sense of safety.

Yet, despite this unimaginable trauma, many are still writing.

We Are Still Here is an anthology of these voices—raw, unfiltered, and courageous. It features short and long stories, poems, essays, and testimonies written by students from Gaza’s universities. These are not retrospective reflections or distant analyses; they are real-time words, emerging from the depths of genocide, displacement, and grief. These writings may be their last hopes to reach the world, a final act of resistance through expression.

Surviving at the darkest extremes of suffering, of destruction and displacement, famine and the constant threat of maiming or death, these young writers speak to us with piercing lucidity. Their resilience is their only form of optimism. Paradoxically, reading them lifts the heart.
– Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and Enduring Love

A moving, painful and yet hopeful collection of the younger generation of the people of Gaza. Sumud, resilience, was never so powerful and clear, as it appears in this must read and urgent collection. —Ilan Pappé, professor, University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, author, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

In the heart of suffering, words are born — and from beneath the rubble, creativity rises. This book is more than a collection of written pages; it is the echo of resilient souls and the cries of pens that spoke when voices were silenced. — Professor Dr. Omar Kh. Melad, President of Al-Azhar University– Gaza

We Are Still Here is not a book about war — it is a book about being alive after the world has decided you are already gone, written in rooms that may no longer stand. These pages are dispatches from the thin edge of the present: letters from hunger, fragments of interrupted lives, flashes of hope so unyielding it burns. Here, young people shape the record of their time on earth, knowing that their time may be short. You will not leave this book with the comfort of closure. It will stay with you long after the final page has turned. — Leila Sansour, filmmaker and founder of Open Bethlehem

These Gaza poignant reflections in prose and poetry from the midst of genocide are both heart-rending and full of life and promise. Israel may have physically killed many of their young authors, but will never kill their words, which live on in this powerful collection of their writings. — Ghada Karmi.

Death is not an ideation for these young writers, but an everyday reality. This collection is a testimony to the power of words. It reveals how love, creativity and hope can galvanise us against fear and inaction. — Selma Dabbagh, author of the novel Out of It and editor of the anthology We Wrote in Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.

Sara Alkhaldy, one of the contributors to We Are Still Here, a new Gazan anthology of student writing, says: ‘I wish I could bottle the scent of our home and take it with me as I left.’ Rula Elkhair writes of studying during displacement: ‘Even in places with no electricity, no water and no stable internet, I installed an eSIM on my phone and climbed to the rooftop under buzzing drones to download lectures. I took exams in cafés by the sea. I studied while hungry, while afraid, while grieving.’ — Selma Dabbagh in London Review of Books, “Knowledge of the Relevant Facts”