A review of Omar’s Diary: Under the Fire of Gaza
(Hamad, Omar 2025. Omaru no Nikki [Omar’s Diary]. Translated by Atsuko Saisho.Tokyo: Umi to Tsuki Sha)
“I am Omar Hamad in Gaza.” The young man calls out to the world. He chronicles the lives of people living in Gaza under Israeli invasion. This book, based on his posts to X from April 2024 to January 2025, records his experiences, emotions, and thoughts in real time.
During this period, he was forced to move repeatedly, tormented by relentless bombardment, harsh weather, hunger, and disease. The sensation of someone’s hand, torn off by a bomb, sticking to his face; the weight of a bag filled with unrecognizable chunks of flesh from a disfigured corpse; the death of his sister-in-law, shot in the chest before his eyes. These are just a few of the horrific events he experienced.
Even as he teetered on the brink of sanity in these extreme conditions, he kept writing—to bear witness to their dignity and humanity, and to continue resisting.
He writes of voices reciting poetry echoing along the shore, of flower sellers amid the rubble, of a child searching for its dead mother. He writes of love for a lost homeland and rage toward a world unable to stop this violence and injustice.
He declares that even if Israel uses every brutal means to annihilate the Palestinians, they will never surrender. For their homeland and people, they will rise again and again.
Even if a ceasefire is brokered by major powers, unless the world changes its perspective, unless it stops calling this massacre Israel’s “self-defense,” labeling Hamas a “terrorist organization,” and attributing all root causes solely to Hamas’s October 2023 attack, the same will happen again.
We must learn to reinterpret what is happening in Gaza now through the experiences and historical facts of those living there, calling it by names different from those imposed by the occupiers. The detailed translator’s notes appended to this book offer essential guidance in this endeavor.
This book is Omar’s life-risking testimony, his plea, his cry. The history and politics, the economics and military technology, the hegemony of knowledge and culture that have brought about this catastrophe are seamlessly connected to our daily lives. We cannot overlook this cry.
朝日新聞に掲載された『オマルの日記：ガザの戦火の下で』書評の英語版です。オマルさんの声が、少しでも多くの人に届くことを願って作成しました。
This is the English translation of the book review of Omar’s Diary, which was originally published in the Asahi Shimbun. I translated it in the hope that Mr. Omar’s voice would reach as many people as possible.