It seemed as though we had entered hell’: Samar Yazbek’s chilling Gaza testimonies
Robin Yassin-Kassab writes in The New Arab on 23 September 2026:
There are sentences in this remarkable, painful book that imply an entire universe of horror. Like this: “We brought my daughter’s leg and buried it next to her brother and sister.” Or this: “A boy was blowing air into a dismembered woman’s corpse, trying to bring her back to life – she was his mother.”
Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life – the title is taken from the flyers dropped by the Israelis minutes before they bombed civilian targets – documents the Gaza genocide, or at least the genocide as experienced by 26 men, women and children interviewed at length throughout 2024 while they were receiving medical treatment in Qatar.
The interviewer, editor and shaper of these narratives is the Syrian novelist and non-fiction writer Samar Yazbek. Yazbek has already produced three documentary texts from the Syrian Revolution and war – Woman in the Crossfire and others.
In the introduction, she explains how the destruction of Gaza reenacted for her the destruction of Syria. She hints at the continuum of experience between the two disasters, and describes her work as “testament to a dream of justice for those living beneath the grindstone of this violent era.”
But there are key differences, terrifying “novel details” involving the technological sophistication of the Israeli genocidaires and their “algorithms of murder.”
Many of the witnesses are householders hit at home in the midst of family life. A child asks for a sandwich, and then, in a flash, life is irretrievably broken. “My brain couldn’t interpret what had happened” is a phrase repeated by several. “It seemed as though we had entered hell” is another.
Some witnesses are doctors, nurses, or volunteers who helped in hospitals. They recount Israeli soldiers bombing maternity wards, storming the intensive care department, methodically destroying the medical equipment. One doctor is forced into the role of human shield. Several witnesses remember Israeli soldiers torturing the maimed and dying in their beds.