Palestinian novelist killed in Israeli airstrike

Novelist and poet Hiba Abu Nada, the author of Oxygen’s Not for the Dead (Dar Diwan), has been killed in her home south of Gaza City by an Israeli airstrike, it has been reported.

Nada, who won second prize in the Sharjah Award for Arabic Creativity in 2016, and whose novel was in its fourth edition, was 32 years old. A final tweet from the author shortly before her death, written in Arabic, has been translated as: "Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets, quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, black apart from the light of the martyrs. Good night, Gaza."

Meanwhile Ra Page, c.e.o. and founder of Comma Press, has said the indie publisher "continues to receive distressing accounts from its authors and others in the writing community in the Gaza Strip". These include the deaths of multiple family members of the writer Atef Abu Saif in an airstrike in Gaza City; Comma said the author "was personally involved in the two-day search for survivors in the debris in the Tal al-Hawa region of the city, and described the ordeal, via voice memos, of digging through the rubble with his bare hands and calling out the names of those missing".

Page also reported the loss by regular Comma contributor Talal Abu Shawish, author of "Red Lights" in Comma’s collection The Book of Gaza, of his daughter-in-law and her entire family in an Israeli airstrike further south, in Nusayrat Camp.

Comma said it had "yet to receive any news from a number of other authors, translators and close friends of the press".

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has said that deaths as a result of the Israeli airstrikes stand at over 5,000. The airstrikes have been instigated in response to the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October which killed 1,400.