Ransacked

On 8 November 2023, Mahmoud Muna, ‘your bookseller in Jerusalem’, was recommending The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid to readers here, while enjoying the ‘immense privilege’ he had to kiss his daughters goodnight and put them to bed. He reflected on how stuck foreign correspondents would be if his bookshop were to close. Where would they get their hundred-page primers on the Palestine-Israel conflict – or their cappuccinos – without the Educational Bookshop?

On 9 February 2025, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem. Mahmoud, who has edited an anthology of Arabic short stories for Granta (2020), is due to speak on a English PEN panel with me at the London Book Fair next month.

Ahmad and Mahmoud were conditionally released yesterday. Charges of disrupting public order are being levelled against both. One of the books used by the prosecution at Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court as evidence of ‘incitement’ is a children’s colouring book by a South African illustrator, Nathi Ngubane, called From the River to the Sea. Other confiscated books include works by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé and Banksy. Ahmad described his arrest as ‘brutal’ and lacking in clarity. ‘I’m feeling very tired, I’m anxious, I’m stressed,’ he said. Both men are under house arrest for five days and forbidden from returning to the bookshops for twenty days. They have been fined 5000 shekels (approximately £1100).

Palestinian cultural and political organisations in East Jerusalem have been under constant attack. Sometimes it’s bureaucratic (impossible registration and licensing requirements combined with punitive taxation); sometimes it’s violent. Israeli police stormed the Yabous Cultural Centre in August 2024 during a screening of a film on Gaza, forcing out the audience and sealing the building. Earlier, in October 2022, security forces had raided the home of the centre’s director, Rania Elias, beating her sixteen-year-old son, Shadi, until he passed out. He was dragged away ‘barefoot and blindfolded’ and held in detention, where he was tortured, for 41 days.

‘Artists are being attacked all the time,’ Ahmed Tobasi, of Artists on the Frontline, told me:

They are the first to be arrested, the first ones being watched and censored from both governments, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It started with the human rights organisations and then the artistic cultural organisations, before a physical attack on the people and the land and so by then no one can notice, or talk.

The Israel army has forcibly displaced more than 26,000 people in the West Bank in two weeks. Jenin refugee camp, which had a population density of 57,712 people per square kilometre in 2023, has been ‘emptied’, according to UN officials, who estimate that 80 per cent of Tulkarem refugee camp residents have also been forced out. Nablus has been bombed. More than twenty buildings have been destroyed in Jenin, its hospital besieged and its roads bulldozed. Footage is coming of Qalqiliya showing men being marched down the road, stripped to their underwear and tied together. More than 66 people are reported to have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the year and a coalition of NGOs has written to the UK government demanding action to de-escalate the violence.

‘Almost half of all Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank since records began were killed in the past two years,’ Save the Children reported from Ramallah on 7 February.

The Israeli aerial bombing of Gaza may have lessened but it has not stopped; nor has the killing of Palestinians by other means. More than a hundred people have been killed since the ceasefire by gunfire and tank shells. Hamas argues that this is a breach of the ceasefire agreement by Israel and has frozen the release of hostages.

Atef Alshaer is a lecturer in Arabic literature at Westminster University. His family were forcibly displaced to Khan Younis when Israel attacked Rafah in May:

My family are a kilometre from Rafah in Khan Younis. Anyone who comes close to the border between Egypt and Gaza is shot at. My brother says they haven’t really benefitted by the ceasefire except that it is a bit quieter, fewer people being killed, which is good. But as for being able to return to their houses, that’s not possible. My nephew tried to return, but the tanks were shooting everywhere. He hid in a partially destroyed building and was OK, but no one has tried to return since. Another relative tried to return to Rafah, a week and a half ago, and he was killed …

In terms of day-to-day living, the harshest aspect for my family is that the wind has blown away their tent several times. They end up running around like mad trying to find a place to cover themselves. It is hard for the children. The weather conditions are difficult. It has produced a lot of grief, particularly for one of my brothers who already lost his son and has gone through so much already. Everything is still very expensive. Prices have come down since the ceasefire, but nowhere near where they used to be …

Before the ceasefire a lot of people were around them in Khan Younis and although it felt very crowded, there was solace in being with other people living under the same conditions. It made them feel part of a human community with shared experiences of tragedy, grief and struggle. Now that people have gone to the north, those who remain feel deserted …

Some of my brother’s friends who have gone back to the north say there is nothing to return to. Some have kept some family members in the south with their tents as a fall-back option. Only a few homes still have running water. There are people who deliver water in tanks, sometimes they charge for it, sometimes it is free through charities. It has been amazing hearing of people rebuilding wells and mending pipes. Some remarkable work. For poor families it is extremely hard. If you don’t have someone abroad to support you, your chances of eking out a living are extremely limited. Living conditions are very bad. There’s a lot of dependency on others. Recently, it has become increasingly hard to get money in. It terrifies me as there are three families that we are trying to support. It may get to the point where we can’t deliver money at all.

My friend Marwa (who last month sent me a picture of the contents page of the anthology Daybreak in Gaza, which Mahmoud Muna coedited for Saqi, as she had spotted my name there) has been reunited with her mother in northern Gaza after more than fifteen months of separation. The journalist Bisan Owda smiled as she returned her apartment building, burnt out and gutted, but still standing.

Owda and others are calling for accountability and the rebuilding of Gaza, as the Hague Group is formed, an initiative ‘aimed to address the failures of international law and the need for collective action against injustices in Palestine’. Meanwhile Dutch MPs have withdrawn an invitation to the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese to speak to them, and Donald Trump has called for all hell to break loose.