Lecture | Book presentation and Q&A
Telling the story of Gaza
- Sami Al-Ajrami (journalist)
- Date
- Monday 3 March 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 005
With foreign journalists banned, and local journalists targeted by the Israeli military, reporting the genocide in Gaza has been a particularly challenging mission. Sami Al-Ajrami is a Palestinian journalist, who has lived and worked in Gaza his entire life until he was displaced to Egypt last year.
During the war on Gaza he kept a diary in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. These fragments form the basis of his book The Keys to the House, which has recently appeared in Dutch (De sleutels van het huis, Ambo|Anthos). Set between the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 and his escape into Egypt in April 2024, Al-Ajrami writes about the constant search for a safe refuge, for food and warmth, but also about the grief of leaving everything behind, and the chronic fear of bombardments. The book forms the chronicle of the immense tragedy of the war in Gaza, combining journalist reporting of the scale of destruction, to an intimate portrait of family life under conditions of extreme deprivation.
On March 3, Gerlov van Englenhoven (LUCAS) and Judith Naeff (LIAS) will talk with Al-Ajrami about surviving, reporting and bearing witness to, the genocide in Gaza, and about what he hopes his book can do in its aftermath.
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