Guardian · 9 hours ago

Written Under Collapsing ceilings, Typed on phones: the Poetry Bringing Palestine to the World | Global Development | the Guardian

When the Islamic University of Gaza's buildings lie 95% destroyed and 72 faculty members and 543 students have been killed, poetry becomes what one professor calls "a witness to history" -- the thing that documents "what cameras cannot always reach and what numbers can never explain." Students gather online in precious moments of solar power, typing on phones with failing batteries, to write and share their work, many honoring their teacher Refaat Alareer, killed with six family members in an airstrike after writing: "If I die / you must live / to tell my story." What strikes deepest about these poems, now published in a collection titled *Let's Throw Away War*, is their remarkable absence of bitterness -- a choice, perhaps, not to become the violence they abhor. As one Glasgow professor who has worked with these students for seventeen years observes simply: "For my students from Gaza, being alive is resistance."