Author's Note
Yesterday, I wrote the Author’s Note for my forthcoming book, The Nightmare Sequence (out in April, in Australia; later this year in the UK/US) and as I shared so many of the poems directly with you all when I wrote them, I want to share this, too, in part as well because the true scale of what we’ve seen over the past 14 months has not been reckoned with or articulated, at least as far as I’ve seen, and I dare to think this is an important step toward that.
Author’s Note
Asalaamu alaikun. This book is a product of genocide, and as such it was important to me, and to my friend and artistic collaborator Dr Safdar Ahmed, to dedicate all author royalties generated by sales of this book to Palestinian charities and relief efforts. I started writing this sequence of poems in late 2023 when I fractured my spine in a fall, and was bed-bound, unable to attend the protests and actions I had been going to regularly. This was my attempt to turn my eyes, my heart, my gift, my labour and leverage, to recording what was being obscured from the outset. I was and remain completely depressed by the refusal of mainstream media to name the genocide, despite the distressing transparency of it, both as articulated by Israelis and shown to us by Palestinians on the ground, which is why I insisted on the inclusion of genocide in every title of this monstrous sequence. Let me be clear in saying that the monstrosity I reference is not just the subject matter, not just the horrors wreaked by the Western-armed and funded apartheid state, but also the evil of this witness: we are not apart from this, we are part of it.
At the time of writing, the official death toll in Gaza is said to stand at around 46,651 with over 100,000 wounded. “Official”, meaning, confirmed bodies that have been tagged and numbered in Gaza’s devastated health system. Official, meaning, accepted by a Western establishment that is complicit in arming, funding, and providing political and propagandistic cover for the genocide itself. Official does not mean real. I am a student of language and its impacts, as a poet and a man and a Muslim it is my belief that the words we use are of spectacular importance in generating meaning, and as such enabling or inhibiting action. Take, for example, the innocuous and oft-repeated phrase “death toll”—what does this imply? A natural occurrence, and a price that has to be paid; that is, an inevitability. Gaza does not have a death toll, it has a massacre manifest, a list of the murdered, a decimation resulting from genocide.
On January 9th, 2025, the Lancet medical journal published a peer-reviewed analysis by epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and academics at Yale University that concluded the estimated dead in Gaza had been undercounted by 41% and therefore the real number of murdered individuals was likely to be 64,260 and could be as high as 78,525—this accounting ends as of June 30th, 2024. 78,525 killed between October 7th and June 30th or one in 35 inhabitants. This number includes only those “directly” killed by Israeli forces, their bombs and bullets, shrapnel and debris.
“Indirect” deaths are not counted, not cited by Western politicians, perhaps because an explanation would be required as to how, exactly, one dies indirectly. This definition includes anyone who dies from preventable illness, hunger, etc.; a demarcation that is particularly useless in the context of a genocide perpetrated by Israeli officials and public figures who have repeatedly articulated their intent to destroy the entirety of Gaza; to cut off the food, water, and electricity; to allow for the spread of diseases to cut through the populace; and who have systematically targeted hospitals, doctors, nurses, health centres, ambulances and paramedics.
Let us return to the figure of 78,525. Last year, the Lancet published a separate analysis which referenced a study on modern urban warfare that found “indirect” killings in urban warfare were 3 to 15 times the amount of “direct” killing. The author suggested a conservative multiplication of four to arrive at a true estimation, then, of the amount of people killed so far in Occupied Palestine. 78,525 times four equals 314,100. This is the conservative estimate, and it is in line with a projection by Professor Devi Sridhar (Chair of Global Public Health, University of Edinburgh) who in September 2024 wrote in the Guardian that she expected the number to reach half a million and certainly 335,500 by the end of 2024.
As nauseating and appalling as this is, we should also consider a non-conservative application of this study—what is the worst case scenario here? The nonprofit Airwars, which analyses the impact of modern airstrikes, released a report proving that Israel’s strikes in Gaza were unprecedented in their scope, intensity, and casualty count. I quote: “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”
With this in mind, should we not at least consider what the highest end of this scale indicates, and multiply the estimated killed by 15 instead of 4? This would leave us at 1.17 million (1,177,875) or roughly half the population murdered in a single year. I remind you that these figures are based on a confirmed “death toll” that ends in July 2024. We are six months of bombings, starvation, torture, rape, summary executions, and sniper shots down-wind from this figure.
I am far from alone in asserting the reality of this genocide. On December 4th, Amnesty International released a 300-page report detailing the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel and concluding it was genocide; on December 19th, Human Rights Watch released their own 179-page report titled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians of Water”; both of these were preceded by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s 124-page report of evidence, titled “Bearing Witness” which came out in January 2024, and Forensic Architecture’s 827-page report titled “A Cartography of Genocide”. In July last year, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling finding Israel guilty of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinians, and in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity.
The evidence is clear, the reality is undeniable. This book is dedicated not just to the Palestinians who have been murdered, and even in their mass graves, still find their existence subjected to a racist debate, but to those who live—nobody questions the figure of over 100,000 wounded because the living, trapped in the Gaza Strip, pose no risk to the status quo the way the legal definition of genocide does, however minimally. Nobody questions that Israel and the West have collectively created the largest cohort of child amputees in history; indeed, the practice of deliberately disabling and maiming Palestinians is long established by Israel. The daily immiseration of Palestinians in the brutal reality of apartheid is unquestioned, and no urgency is given to their relief and liberation.
Insha’Allah this book, even if it is only one grain of sand, will help tip the scales toward justice for the living and the dead, the disappeared and the displaced and all who remain. May we all live to see a free Palestine.
This morning I woke to the welcome news that a ceasefire deal, identical to one proposed eight months ago, has been agreed to by Hamas and Israel, and will come into effect on Sunday, January 19th.
In the meantime, Israel continues to kill with impunity; I hope and pray that on Sunday, the ceasefire will go into effect and hold. Given they’ve violated the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah over 1,000 times since that deal was struck, there is not much reason for this hope except that the self-proclaimed “proud Zionist” Joe Biden will no longer be in office, and Trump has proven, over and over again, to be fundamentally uninterested in anything other than himself and making money. Arab officials say his envoy did more in one meeting to bring this ceasefire into effect than Biden did in 14 months and that would be because Biden had no issue whatsoever with the systematic extermination of Palestinians or the annexation of their land.
In local news, this week the Labor government sent our Zionist Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to Israel to “mend the relationship” between our country and the apartheid state carrying out a genocide. Never mind that the leaders of apartheid Israel are war criminals with active arrest warrants out to bring them to the Hague for the crime of genocide; never mind that this is the highest legal officer in the land, lending credibility to war criminals, offering a handshake instead of sanctions, instead of the suspension of trade, as required by international law.
Speaking of sanctions, news broke yesterday that an Australian fighting in Ukraine was possibly killed by Russian forces, and in response Prime Minister Albanese warned that his government would take “the strongest possible action”, and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said “all cards are on the table” when asked about expelling the Russian ambassador. Meanwhile, when Israel assassinated six World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, the Albanese government didn’t so much as threaten to sneeze, instead meekly accepting Israel’s claim that it was an “accident”. Never mind that it’s an accident they’ve repeated hundreds of times, killing over 250 aid workers, hundreds of UN employees; never mind that all aid workers and UN staff have to coordinate their movements in advance with IDF forces. Never mind that no consequence was ever offered for the Lebanese Australians killed by Israel in its invasion of Lebanon, either.
These racist double-standards have become the hallmark of the Albanese government and this was again on display this morning in the joint statement released by the PM and Penny Wong. In which they write: “Australia remains unequivocal in our condemnation of Hamas' atrocities on 7 October, and its ongoing acts of terror. There must be no role for Hamas in the future governance of Gaza. An future Palestinian state must not be in a position to threaten Israel's security.”
Unequivocal condemnation for Hamas, and no mention whatsoever of the 78,525 Palestinians who have been slaughtered by Israel, and the estimated 314,000 killed in a livestreamed genocide. What is one day of violence in comparison to 467 days of non-stop bombardment, mass killing, forced starvation, field executions, rape, the assassination of journalists and doctors and nurses, the destruction of hospitals, the razing of an entire city with over 85,000 tonnes of bombs? What if I were to flip it and say instead “There must be no role for Israel in future governance. Any future Israeli state must not be in a position to threaten Palestine’s security?” This statement has far more validity given their proud, boastful violation of the Genocide Convention and contempt both for human decency and international law, but would still be incorrect for the fundamental reason that Palestinians have been consistently calling for one state for decades, in which all have equal rights, including the right of return. Albanese would know this if he listened to anyone other than Zionists, but no, instead we have this paternalistic, colonial garbage dictating to Palestinians.
I should also mention that the Albanese government maintained arms exports, the manufacture of weapons parts and military equipment used in the bombardment by the genocidal killers every step of the way, so this kind of racist one-sided statement should not be surprising but it is utterly brazen in its contempt for Palestinian lives and an example of how inept and out of touch Albanese is to fumble so simple a thing as a statement welcoming a ceasefire. I’m so horrified and ashamed by what this Labor government has made us complicit in, so dismayed and distressed by the racism, the hostility, the clear and vile double-standards in who they choose to protect, and who they are happy to show their backs to; I truly hope Australians can see this awfulness for what it is and send the Labor party an unmistakeable message at the coming election.
Salaam,
Omar