Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza
Nonfiction | Hassan Kanafani with Yasuko Thanh | Issue 54
Excerpt: Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza
Hassan Kanafani is from Gaza. He is a graduate from the Faculty of Engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.
“Three activists, moved by his words, started collecting his [Reddit] posts without a clear plan - only the conviction that his story needed to be seen and the hope that somehow, it might help raise funds for him. By chance, those posts found their way to award-winning author Yasuko Thanh, who helped Hassan frame them for a book.” —Arsenal Pulp Press Description
Chapter 1: December 2024
We Won’t Feel the Cold
I sit in the modest tent I share with my family, in one of Gaza’s crowded camps in the desert near the beach. The hanging piece of fabric separating me from my nearest neighbours barely conceals the view, let alone sound. Everyone can hear everyone else; there is no privacy at all.
My neighbours stare at their empty table, which used to hold simple meals for their children. But today, there is no bread. The empty flour shelf stands as a silent witness to their days-long struggle.
Their little boy walks in, his bright eyes reflecting the innocence of childhood. He asks in a soft voice, “Mom, when will we have bread?”
His mother swallows her tears and replies with a bittersweet smile, “Soon, my dear. Soon.”
She tries to ignore the sound of his growling stomach, which echoes through the tent. But she knows the promises she makes every day have become too heavy for a young child’s heart to believe. In the marketplace, the bakeries are closed, and flour is as rare as hope in these harsh days.
She pleads with her husband, “Go to the market tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find some bread for the kids.”
But he replies, defeated, “I go out every day looking for something, but with no flour, few bakeries, and long lines of people, I come back empty-handed.”
Later, the couple sit together, and the father says, his voice heavy with sorrow, “I can’t bear this. Our children sleep hungry, and we’re powerless to change it.”
I can’t witness their pain any longer. We have only half a sack of flour left—barely twenty-five kilograms—but I decide to share it with them.
“I’ve divided what little we have left. Here—it’s not much, but it’s enough to bake a few loaves of bread.”
Tears stream down the mother’s face—not just out of gratitude, but because she feels humanity is still alive, despite everything.
They bake bread that day. Though the meal is simple, it is filled with the love and resilience of neighbours supporting each other. But the story doesn’t end there.
The next morning, as the son sits with his mother, he says, “Mom, when I grow up, I’ll plant wheat. I won’t let anyone go hungry ever again.”
His small words spark a new hope in their hearts, despite the darkness surrounding them.
A few afternoons later, by the hospital’s washing area, I watch a mother gather her martyred son’s clothes—his watch, his belt.* It is known that a martyr1 is buried as they are, with their clothes and belongings.
I quickly step closer, my voice low. “Ma’am, it’s better for the martyr to remain with all his belongings.” Her eyes don’t meet mine. “Let his brother wear them, son,” she says, her voice breaking. “Both of them share what they wear, and the other one is injured, and I don’t have anything to buy him a change of clothes.”
I can’t answer. My throat tightens, and I stand frozen—too stunned to speak, too raw to understand her pain. She keeps sorting the clothes, while rage boils inside me. I conduct my errands, angry at a world cruel enough to force a mother into such impossible choices, then I return to the tent where we now live—displaced, surrounded by siege, stripped of nearly everything, surviving with what little we have.
When night falls, the tents that shelter families feel more like thrones of fear. The thin fabric offers no defence against the cold that creeps in uninvited, nor does it stop the wind, which batters the fragile walls like a warning. In the darkness, the tent becomes a doorless prison—a cramped space where anxiety and dread cling to the air. Every gust of wind carries the threat of an explosion, and every stretch of silence feels like the breath before disaster.
The roar of warplanes tearing through Gaza’s sky keeps eyes turned upward, waiting. Expecting. Dreading. Nothing protects us except whispered prayers, hushed words sent up in desperation—the only shield left. But the tents cannot warm the frozen limbs of children, nor calm the frightened hearts of their mothers. Night is never a time of rest. It is another battle: with cold, with fear, with hunger, with the long, grinding wait for whatever comes next.
Gaza is being killed a hundred times a day—and no one moves a finger. Killing, bombing, and cold aren’t enough. Now hunger has arrived. The price of a bag of flour has reached US$200.
And the dogs have eaten the body of a martyr with special needs.
That night, the tents around us collapse and are blown away, and we wait for the same thing to happen to us. We look at the ceiling as it sways left and right. I’m afraid the tent pole will fall on my mother and sister, so I stand beside it, holding on. My father moves from one side of the tent to the other, trying to seal the gaps to prevent the cold wind from entering. My other brother leaves us to help our neighbours stabilize their tent, but the effort is in vain. And my younger brother holds up the tarp surrounding our tent to block the wind, also in vain, as it tears apart. We wish for rain to calm the wind, then we remember that the nylon sheets above the tent have flown away, so we will drown if it rains.
I think of my mother and father and how age has taken a toll on their health. Feeling overwhelmed and helpless, I wish for the whole world to collapse along with our tent, so I don’t have to see them like this.
Rain hammers down, and the wind screams. Flood waters surge through our small camp, ripping fragile tents apart. Residents scramble to salvage whatever they can.
Inside one tent, our neighbour Umm Ahmad huddles over her four children, shielding them from the cold and the creeping water. Her children’s trembling voices pierce the storm: “Mama, the water’s coming!” She clutches the soaked blankets, whispering frantic reassurances.
Just steps away, I and a few other neighbours stack sandbags, desperate to hold back the flood. But the water overwhelms us, tearing more tents to ruins. Around me, screams of women and children fill the night. Helpless, I watch everything collapse.
Umm Ahmad stumbles out, clutching her wailing infant. “Where do we go? Everything’s gone!” she cries.
I only stare at her, words failing me.
By dawn, mud and water coat the ground. Nearly all the tents are wrecked, unlivable. Barefoot children shiver in the cold while their mothers search for safety. I sink to the ground, hands on my head, swallowed by the impossible question: How do we survive when we have nothing left?
Local reporters ask us on camera how we are coping under these conditions. They will upload these videos to social media. I can’t begin to tell them how those hours passed. No one can truly understand what we went through.
Passing by on my way to work, I overhear my nearest neighbours. The boy says to his mother, “I froze from the cold.”
She answers softly, “Don’t worry, inshallah we will all die, and then we won’t feel the cold at all.”2
Excerpt from Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza by Hassan Kanafani, with Yasuko Thanh (2026), with permission from Arsenal Pulp Press.
Hassan Kanafani (he/him) is from Gaza. He is a graduate from the Faculty of Engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.
Yasuko Thanh (she/her) is a writer and a creative writing instructor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC. Her first novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains (Penguin Canada), a tale of rebellion in French Indochina, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2016. Her bestselling memoir, Mistakes to Run With (Penguin Canada), which reflected on her journey from sex worker to successful writer, was a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Her most recent novel, To the Bridge (Hamish Hamilton), explored gaps in mental health care preventing suicide. Her next novel, The Falling Maria, is forthcoming in 2027.
Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza by Hassan Kanafani with Yasuko Thanh Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026
A heart-wrenching personal account of the ongoing devastation in Gaza by an ordinary citizen who bears witness to the undoing of his community and homeland
The human tragedy unfolding in Gaza has been made all the more tragic by the widespread denial and apathy expressed by much of the rest of the world. Here is an urgent first-hand account of life and death in Gaza, written not by a war correspondent, but an ordinary citizen whose life was upended when the genocide began.
In the midst of the chaos, Hassan began posting about his daily experiences on Reddit. Three activists, moved by his words, started collecting his posts without a clear plan - only the conviction that his story needed to be seen and the hope that somehow, it might help raise funds for him. By chance, those posts found their way to award-winning author Yasuko Thanh, who helped Hassan frame them for a book.
Hassan’s missives are a vivid, heartbreaking account of war and its toll - on families, on children, on innocent civilians. These are stories of hunger, survival, and death. These are stories that demand to be heard. And yet, stories like these are not being told: Mainstream media has largely remained silent. Foreign journalists are barred from Gaza. Local journalists are being killed. In this vacuum, Hassan’s voice breaks through out of the darkness and into the light.
Pizza Before We Die is literary journalism at its rawest and most urgent - clear eyed, unflinching, and deeply humane. Hassan captures the unspeakable horror of the tragedy in Gaza with restraint and precision, never sensationalizing, always bearing witness. It is a work of raw power and emotion, and a reminder that in the midst of chaos and tragedy, our shared humanity remains intact.
A portion of proceeds from the sale of Pizza Before We Die will be donated to Doctors Without Borders / Medecins Sans Frontieres.
