‘My poems are part of my flesh’: Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen on life in Gaza: At just 20, the poet is one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. She talks about dreams of Oxford, the deaths of friends and how tragedy has shaped the person she has become.

‘I’m less timid now’ … Batool Abu Akleen. Photograph: PR -  One of her close friends, the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring, a month before the Cannes film festival premiere of a documentary about her life, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.

 by Claire Armitstead

Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.

But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation... READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/05/my-poems-are-part-of-my-flesh-palestinian-poet-batool-abu-akleen-on-life-in-gaza 

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Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk - Official UK Trailer

PUT YOUR SOUL ON YOUR HAND AND WALK is a haunting testament to the resilience of daily life under siege in Gaza. Captured through a filmmaker's video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, these calls act as a powerful digital lifeline to the realities of war, resistance and survival.

‘I must document everything’: the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza. Fatma Hassouna used poetry and photography to record the death and devastation she saw daily. Was she targeted by the IDF? ... We speak to the director of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a film about the journalist

Fatima will not be forgotten #fatmahassona

 The Guardian - Julian Borger

Wed 6 Aug 2025 11.46 EDT

‘I must document everything’: the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza. Fatma Hassouna used poetry and photography to record the death and devastation she saw daily. Was she targeted by the IDF?

Israel has sought to pursue its campaign of annihilation against Gaza and its people behind closed doors. More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far, and no outside reporters or cameras are allowed in.

The effects of this policy of concealment – which the Guardian managed to pierce this week with a shocking aerial photograph that made the front page – are to ensure that the outside world only catches sight of Gaza’s horrors in small fragments, and to stifle empathy for those trapped inside by hiding them from view, obscuring their humanity. But a new documentary film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, seeks to open a window to the unfathomable suffering inside Gaza.

It focuses on the life of a single young Palestinian woman named Fatma Hassona, known as Fatem to those close to her. She is 24 years old when we meet her, and has such a broad smile and enthusiasm for life that she compels attention from her first appearance, a few minutes into the film.

We see Hassona’s life through the screen of a mobile phone belonging to the director, Sepideh Farsi, and most of the film is made up of the conversations between these two women as they develop an increasingly strong personal bond over the course of a year.

The director knows all about conflict and oppression. Farsi is Iranian-born and was a teenager at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. When she was 16 she was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic regime, and she left the country for good two years later, settling in France. She was on tour with her film The Siren, a feature-length animation about the Iran-Iraq war, when the Gaza conflict erupted in October 2023. As the civilian death toll mounted, she found herself unable just to sit on the sidelines, watching endless debates that did nothing to stop the slaughter.

“The common denominator was that there was never the Palestinian voice there,” Farsi says. “We had different points of views: the American, the European, the Egyptian, the Israeli, but never the Palestinian. It started really bothering me, and at some point I couldn’t live with it any more.”

In spring last year she flew to Cairo with the idea that she could somehow find a way across the Gaza border to film the war firsthand. That quickly proved a naive and futile mission, so she began filming Gazan refugees in Egypt. One of them suggested to Farsi that if she wanted to talk to someone inside, he could put her in touch with his friend Fatma in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City.

We first see Hassona the way Farsi meets her, on her little phone screen... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/06/fatma-hassouna-sepideh-farsi-put-your-soul-on-your-hand-and-walk-documentary-gaza-palestinian-photographer?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

A wasteland of rubble, dust and graves: how Gaza looks from the sky

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