Survivors of the Darkness – Wesam Afifa, Translated by Husam Almadhoun

Description

Some books should never need to be written. This is one such.

It is not written out of literary ambition or to entertain a reader. It is written as a document of the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. This is a book about the experience of a journalist, Osama, who was in Israeli prisons – including the Auschwitz of Palestine, Sde Teiman – from March 2024 to October 2025.

Osama, who was born in Gaza in 1990, spent these twenty months in what can only be described as a maze of torture chambers – one terrible prison after the other, one indignity after the other, one torment after the other.

This is not an easy book to read. Wesam Afifa and Osama are fellow journalists, and in this catalogue of cruelty, Afifa allows Osama’s story to remain almost entirely told from within the pain, without too much commentary. Osama’s testimony shows how the prison, intended as a site of silencing, becomes instead a testament to endurance — and to the persistence of a people whose political existence cannot be extinguished.