Picked up this beautiful copy of The Sea Cloak & Other Stories at the weekend and felt compelled to read it straight away. The stories within this book are just as beautifully written and translated as the cover illustration. The way Qarmout writes about Gaza, the sea, the women and children who live there, it’s a love letter to a place whose complete destruction we are currently witnessing in real time. It’s devastating, haunting.

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Published in 2017, these super short stories explore the tense reality of living in a country under occupation. Qarmout depicts children scrambling to make a living searching through rubble, men navigating fraught tensions just to work and not end up dead, women grasping for a life just out of their reach. Hypocrisies are laid bare, dreams of freedom (in more than one sense) shared, lives cut short by brutal and needless violence.

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I was struck by one story where a woman is reliving her sexual assault while caring for a child. The child is oblivious to the woman’s inner turmoil, happily watching Masha and the Bear, a show my nieces both love. Do the children of Gaza not deserve to continue to live carefree lives filled with silly cartoons? We see videos of children carrying other children, both deceased and alive, forced into the role of caretaker so young. World powers must surely see this too, and yet they continue to do nothing.

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Keep reading and amplifying Palestinian voices, both fiction and nonfiction, don’t look away from the atrocities that have been ongoing not just for the last 100+ days, but 75 years.