“I want people to understand”: Writers in Gaza publish zines through volunteer-led Coastal Lines Press

Audio excerpts of interview with Lama Alharazin, including Alharazin reciting her poem “Those who are still here” from her zine “Rain Was Once A Promise”:

“During the war, I actually couldn’t find sense of the chaos around me. I was always looking for meaning in every displacement” says 24 year old writer Lama Alharazin over a Zoom call from Gaza City on August 30. “I was missing my home, I was missing my life, but I only found a way to make sense through writing. I started writing. I wrote about my home, my friends, the loss, the beautiful memories, and everything I could remember. And at one point I felt that these words, these stories, should be heard by so many people. I started looking for ways to share my work with others.”

She published Rain Was Once A Promise with Coastal Lines Press in March 2026. Her first zine, it is filled with 21 original poems. The white cover, illustrated by Lama Mohammed, carries the sketched silhouette of a bird, its body bearing the outline of a crying girl wearing a thobe and keffiyeh. 

Alharazin recites her poem ‘Those who are still here’ in a voice that is clear, rhythmic, contemplative, and blunt. It is about her home, no longer standing, on a street she no longer recognizes. She reads: 

Those who are still here 

Those who are still here have no homes

And the homes that are still standing have no people

We have become strangers to our land 

Houses empty with no voice inside

And if you ask ‘what is left in here’

You’ll see ashes and bodies buried deep down

They could not make it to any place of escape 

Their souls went to the skies without saying goodbye

It is you and me again in this place

But you are the only one I seem to recognize 

I look at the sunset and it has never looked like this before

Why is the horizon so bright? Why is there no reflection of the sun anywhere?

Where are the trees and laughter and streets? When did this become a barren desert?

Where is our home?

Maybe we are in the wrong street. Let’s turn around, maybe we will see it there. 

But when we look, we see no streets, no marks, no houses. 

I thought you had taken everything with you when you ran away

I left but I never said goodbye. 

I want to water my mint plant one more time. 

I want to sleep in my room one last time. 

I want to gather with my family one more time

I want to hug my teddy bear again.

I want to walk up the stairs one last time. 

I heard they were competing over who could destroy more.

I wish they had left our half-standing house. 

Did they count it as one, or was it just stones for them? 

It had my memories and it was the witness that I had been there. 

Alharazin wrote the poem when a ceasefire was announced. People were returning to the homes they had fled, unsure what was left of them.

“My home was gone,” says Alharazin. “I knew that it was gone, and I went there knowing that I wouldn’t find it. As I was walking up the street, I didn’t recognize anything in it. So I went with my brother and I kept asking him, ‘where are we?’. I spent twenty years of my life living in this street, and now I don’t seem to recognize it…[The poem] is a lament for my home, and I was just remembering the tiny details of it.”

She published her second zine, Flowers Need Light, with Coastal Lines Press in August 2026. It is a collection of 19 essays. Its cover — again illustrated by Mohammed — shows a silhouette of a dove that writhes or dances against the sun, its body filled with twining white flowers. An excerpt from Alharazin’s essay Al Rasheed Street – May 2024 reads:

When the ceasefire was announced, I held onto the hope that the borders would open and we would still have that chance of leaving. 

But we went back to Gaza.

The place that had the best and worst memories.

The place that numbed my soul. 

The place that reminds me of December 4.

The place where my demons hide.

The place where I walked over dead bodies and wounded people who begged me to save them.

How could I save them when I could barely stay on my feet?

How could I have possibly saved them when I was unable to speak or hold myself up?

Didn’t they see I was leaning on my brother’s shoulders to leave the massacre?

The prose is accompanied by Mohammed’s illustration of a girl cradled against a dove, holding flowers. 

Some of the essays in Flowers Need Light describe the stories of people Alharazin met. In  “Letter to the reader”, she writes: I invite you to walk with me. As a witness and war survivor, these words come from within, an echo of what was lost and what could not have been saved. They are for those who lost a piece of their soul. Some of these words are someone else’s reality and I cannot imagine their pain. By documenting their stories, I hope I can honour their memory.

Alharazin hopes that her writing will bring understanding and kindness to the world. 

“I want people to understand,” says Alharazin. “No matter what I say or write, I know it will never be the same as experiencing it, but I want them to understand a little bit of what we have been through, and that life was not easy during these past three years, and that we have experienced so many things. Torture, chaos, agony, pain — they all took different forms, but it was always me coming back to my own nature, wanting not only compassion from people, but wanting someone to hear me, and someone to understand me. At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding one another, being kind to one another.” 

Alharazin describes Coastal Lines Press as a community of volunteers from across the world, “people just offering their talent, their skills, their time, for authors from Gaza, without getting anything in return.” 

She explains that the press launched in summer 2025 with writer Shahd Alnaami in Gaza, who shared her writings with Germany-based author Leila Boukarim upon meeting at an online writing workshop. Boukarim helped Shahd craft her writings into a zine. Soon, so many writers began reaching out to Boukarim that she sought volunteers worldwide who could help edit, illustrate, translate, design, market, and distribute the zines. 

Coastal Lines Press currently comprises 38 writers in Gaza and over 100 volunteers from across the world who collaborate over Slack. Anyone can volunteer with Coastal Lines Press — as editors, illustrators, translators, and more — by filling out a sign-up form. Writers in Gaza share their work through a submission form, volunteer editors provide constructive feedback, and then share the writings with volunteer illustrators and graphic designers. 

When the zine comes together — edited, illustrated, and organized — volunteers post it to Coastal Lines Press’ website and prepare it for distribution in PDF and print. 46 zines have been produced to date. All can be purchased online by donation, with all proceeds going to the writers. 

Alharazin’s zines were edited by Anja Meyer, Karan, and Annick Yerem, with illustrations by Lama Mohammed and layouts by Selin Doğaner. 

“If I speak forever, I would never be able to give them what they actually deserve, because they took my writings and then helped me put it in the most beautiful way, and then made it ready to be shared with the world. And that, for me, was everything,” says Alharazin of the team who worked on her zine. “They made me feel welcome. I think that’s the idea of CLP, is that they make you feel that you are home — you belong to them and they belong to you. That was everything about it.” 

Alharazin learned of Coastal Lines Press through a series of nurturing relationships. The first was Fiona Murphy, a professor at Dublin City University in Ireland, who Alharazin met online last September while inquiring over email about Irish government scholarships. Murphy helped Alharazin prepare a scholarship application. 

“She gave me a huge hope. In the morning, I was a hopeless person. After her email, all of a sudden, I am the most powerful person in the world,” says Alharazin. “I felt like now I have a way out of Gaza, and I have someone who believes in me. And so we started talking every day, discussing the chances.”

From a tent in al-Mawasi, the largest humanitarian camp in the south of Gaza, Alharazin learned that she had not been selected for the scholarship. She felt desperation, helplessness, and futility. Murphy comforted her, telling her to never give up. Alharazin shared her poem “those who are left” with her. Murphy, moved by the poem, insisted that it must be published and connected her with Anja Meyer, who runs Berlin-based Sìdhe Press and online readings called “We keep telling – A reading series for Gaza”. Meyer invited Alharazin to recite her work at the online readings. Alharazin sent a recording, listeners at the online gathering loved her work, and Meyer put Alharazin in touch with Boukarim of Coastal Lines Press to publish her poems.

“When I first got to meet Leila, she was a very, very kind, supportive person. She made me feel wanted and she made me feel that my words matter. And she was like a huge light for me. The one that sparked everything.”

New zines released by Coastal Lines Press are launched over 30-40 minute zoom calls, organized by Meyer, where six to seven readers recite new works by the writers. The calls begin with an introduction to Coastal Lines Press by Meyer, the readings are done in sequence, and then the virtual floor is open for listeners to share their thoughts. Anyone in the world can join, with donations to the writers encouraged in lieu of a fee. 

“We just listen to one another. We celebrate this quiet, calm moment. It makes me remember how many good people we have in this world and I am forever grateful for everyone that I got to meet,” says Alharazin. “The comments I get afterwards are just priceless…They would write me, ‘thank you so much for inviting us, it was an honour to read your words, we are forever grateful for knowing you, and we hope that you continue to shine and share your words with us’. They always tell me ‘never stop writing’. They tell me ‘we need you and the world needs you and you are a wonderful person’.” 

Alharazin takes these Zoom calls from a café, where Internet access and electricity are more reliable. She always invites her little sister to these launches to read one of her poems. Her family — her parents, younger sister, and younger brother — are in tents in Al-Mawasi. Alharazin is in Gaza City, living with her husband in a home. 

“I met a very wonderful person who is now my husband. I found the missing piece of me in this person, and I moved to Gaza City with him. I live in a home, but my family are still living in a tent, and till this day I write about tents. I sometimes wake up at night because of a nightmare that I am living in a tent… Even here, life in Gaza is not safe, like many bombings happen from time to time. You do not trust the news, you do not trust leaving the house for many hours. But still, we manage to find ways to live.”

Alharazin felt like a writer ever since she started her studies at the Islamic University of Gaza, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and translation in September 2023. She wrote numerous essays for courses she took with Dr. Refaat Alareer, professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, who shared his last poem with the world, “If I must die”, on November 1, 2023. She fondly remembers an exam on Shakespeare’s Othello; Alareer praised her well-crafted response to one of the questions, sharing it with the whole class on their Facebook group.  

“I was taught by the most talented professor ever. I’m not sure if you know his name, but he was killed in December 2023. His name is Refaat Alareer… He made me a writer,” says Alharazin. “He shared my answer in the final exam, and then he wrote ‘to be honest, I have not seen an answer as perfect and beautiful as this one since many years’ and then he was like ‘thank you Lama, and here’s a bonus’.”

The exam question required students to comment on the Othello line ‘it was a handkerchief and an antique token my father gave my mother’. Alharazin wrote: 

This was said by Othello in the final act of the play after he smothered his wife. The handkerchief plays an important role in the downfall of the marriage of Othella and Desdemona. It was the deadly proof for Othella that his wife has been cheating on him with Cassio. Hence, Othello is justifying his horrible deed by bringing up the story of the handkerchief and how he has seen it with Cassio. We are left to wonder which story is the real one, because in the previous act and for the first time in the play, Othello brought up the story of the handkerchief claiming that an Egyptian woman gave it to his mother. Now he is changing his story and saying that it was his father who gave it to his mother. It could be a possibility that Othello is being traumatized at this moment and he cannot function well or remember the real events of the story. His wife is laying dead on the bed and he is the one who murdered her. Therefore, his mind must have been shocked that he couldn’t think straight. Another way to perceive this is that Othello might have been lying all along about the handkerchief. A story of a precious thing cannot be forgotten easily or said by changing a fundamental essence of it, such as who gave it to whom. After all, maybe the green monster inside of Othello is the one who made him create this story. 

Alareer’s praise remains dear to Lama to this day.

“Getting a bonus from him is like a miracle. So that was a moment I would never forget,” says Alharazin. “I still have a screenshot of his post. I will cherish it forever.” 

She is continuing her studies as a virtual scholar at the University of Exeter in English and Creative Writing. 

“This urge to live, I think, will never be stolen away from me. I would never let it slip away.” 

Lama Alharazin reviewed this article prior to publication to ensure accurate and respectful coverage.