Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life Samar Yazbek Review

In early 2024, Samar Yazbek found herself in Doha, where more than 2,500 Palestinian survivors of the genocide in Gaza were living alongside their families and receiving desperately needed medical care. Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. Forced into exile after joining the uprising against the Assad regime in 2011, she wrote several books collecting the testimonies of those who resisted the regime or who were forced to live through the civil war, including A Woman in the Crossfire and The Crossing. In 2024, seeing the survivors in Doha, Yazbek was immediately transported back to her experiences in Syria: ‘The silhouettes of the victims, the very same moans – it was disaster, all over again.’ And once again she feels compelled to share these survivors’ stories with the world: ‘I felt called upon as a writer trading in words and narrative as a means of empathy, of effecting change and, most crucially, of understanding the dangerous world around us, thinking of a better, more humane future.’

Bearing Witness

It was with this aim that from March to June 2024, Yazbek built personal relationships with the survivors and collected the first-person accounts of twenty-seven men, women and children, with ages ranging from thirteen to sixty-five. Only two of the stories, both from young men still living in Gaza, were not told to Yazbek face to face. Now made accessible to an Anglophone readership in Leri Price’s sensitive translation, Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life represents a conscious opposition to the current news climate in which human destruction is reduced to ‘pictures and numbers which erase it from humanity’s collective conscience, turning it into a momentary consumer product and causing fundamental meanings to disappear within the fetid decay of the immediate moment’.

For their part, the survivors were ready to tell their stories to Yazbek and to have them distributed to a wider audience. ‘Please, Samar, tell all of this!’ says Wafaa Asaad Abu Samaan, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and a cancer patient on 7 October 2023, who lost her husband to Israeli bombing along with a leg and a hand, and who was terrified during repeated evacuations that the Israeli soldiers would shoot her in the belly if they saw that she was pregnant, having witnessed such a murder with her own eyes. ‘I want to share what I saw. Please, write down every word,’ says Bushra Al-Ghalban Abu Sabih, an UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) employee who lost ten members of her family when the Israelis bombed a UNRWA school where displaced people were sheltering in the belief that they would be safe.

Many of the survivors – including sixty-five-year-old grandfather Muhammad Hamdan, whose entire extended family was killed except one grandson – list the names of those they have lost. ‘Please remember their names, please remember them and don’t forget, remember some of them at least,’ he says to Yazbek.

As Preti Taneja writes of the book, it is ‘almost too painful to read, but so deeply important that it compels us not to look away’. The violence the survivors have endured is horrific, but – willingly told in their own words – it is never gratuitous. Saja Yasir Salih, a twenty-three-year-old whose husband and two daughters – one of them an infant – were killed when their house was bombed, tells Yazbek that the Israeli military cut off the internet in any area they are about to bomb: ‘They wanted to kill us away from the eyes of the world’. With the news coverage on Gaza dwindling almost three years after the events of October 7, this book is a vital reminder of the ongoing genocide and the almost unimaginable extent of its human costs.

**‘You know the story, Samar’**

A fifteen-year-old boy, Muhannad Radwan, is giving his account to Yazbek, describing the multiple times he and his family were displaced as the bombing ‘followed’ them across Gaza. ‘Do you want more details?’ he asks. ‘You must have heard them over and over. Each of our stories is just like anyone else’s.’

In Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, each testimony is striking both for the individual horror it contains and for its similarity with the other twenty-six accounts. In each one, there is a phrase or an image in which the weight of the destruction of a human being’s former life can be felt. Samir Al-Agha, describing his murdered fifteen-year-old daughter, says, ‘She had the most beautiful fingers in the world’. S, a woman who prefers not to give her name, describes lying under the rubble after an explosion and hearing her mother call out only her brothers’ names, not hers. These are the details that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.

At the same time, identical nightmarish details permeate each story. There is a collective agreement that this ‘war’ (one of the survivors, Nada Eisa Ayaash, objects strongly to this term) is not the same as those the inhabitants of Gaza, all too used to wars, have lived through before – it is something much worse, an attempt to annihilate the entire population.

In most accounts, people lose dozens of family members. As the translator points out both in a footnote and in her Translator’s Note, the family relationships of Palestinians are close and intricate, and she underlines ‘the devastation that occurs when this tight-knit fabric is ripped’.

There is a collective horror over the sieges and destruction of hospitals, the bombing of family homes, and the targeting of civilians with no connection to Hamas or resistance groups. Medical supplies and vital medicine are in short supply and then completely unavailable for even the worst cases. The scarcity of food and water, which as Yazbek writes in her updated author’s note from 2025 has now revealed itself to be a deliberate use of ‘starvation and death from starvation as another form of systematic genocide’, adds yet another layer of suffering to the lives of people who have already lost everything.

Also described in Yazbek’s preface is the use of AI warfare against the Palestinians. Drones (known as ‘zannanat’) and quadcopters give instructions, enter people’s homes, scan irises for identification, shoot civilians as they flee and, in one harrowing passage, stand deadly guard over a doctor’s decomposing body for two weeks as his friends, family and neighbours watch from their windows, unable to give him an honourable burial. They are a constant source of terror, a new form of warfare alongside the unknown poisons mentioned in multiple accounts which choke the air after bombings.

The impact of these images in the statements only increases as they return over and over and again. ‘There are over two million stories of this kind in Gaza’, writes Leri Price in her November 2025 Translator’s Note. Most of those stories will remain forever unheard. The twenty-seven voices in Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life represent a minuscule fraction of the suffering and death inflicted on Gaza and the Palestinian people.

The Current Situation

Both Price’s Translator’s Note and Yazbek’s October 2025 preface, written more than a year after the survivors told their stories, paint a grim picture of the reality on the ground in Gaza. Price includes a stark list of the statistics of overwhelming destruction and death: 67,000 people killed, ninety two per cent of Gaza’s houses demolished, ninety five per cent of the population displaced . . . Yazbek, for her part, writes, ‘The horrifying testimonies I gathered were only the beginning of a systematic process of murder . . . another year has passed and still we are falling into the abyss’.

In May 2026, we are still falling. The ceasefire that Yazbek mentions as having already been violated by the Israelis is still routinely being violated. According to a Guardian editorial from 7 May, eight hundred people have been killed by the Israeli military since the ceasefire was declared, and essential supplies including water are still being blocked from reaching the Palestinian people. There are doubtless countless other crimes going unreported. Yazbek’s dream of ‘a better, more humane future’ seems very far away. She ends her updated preface with a bleak paragraph which seems only more relatable today: ‘Perhaps, to my crushing disappointment, for all those lives I collected, believing I would defend victims who resisted death and lost pieces of their bodies and lives – perhaps I have done nothing but add a black stain to human history. A stain of words . . . the words of the people of Gaza’

Nevertheless, these words and the voices speaking them are vitally important. With Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, Voices From Gaza, Yazbek, Price and Fitzcarraldo have made it possible to listen.