Palestinian Envoy Demands End to 'Most Documented Genocide in History'
"Peace will not be achieved at the expense of our rights but by upholding them," said Riyad Mansour. "That is the only path to peace. Let us finally collectively embark on it."
Ahead of the International Court of Justice's expected advisory opinion on legal consequences for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, Palestine's permanent observer at the United Nations reminded other diplomats at a U.N. Security Council meeting on Wednesday that the slaughter of more than 38,000 people in Gaza has been broadcast for nine months—while Israel has claimed it is acting in self-defense and is targeting Hamas.
"What is happening in Gaza is going down as the most documented genocide in history," Riyad Mansour said. "When will the world denounce the crimes and stop tolerating their reoccurrence?"
In addition to the daily news of aerial and ground attacks on schools, homes, and places of worship in Gaza, Mansour pointed to Israeli soldiers' filming of their own attacks in the enclave, leaving no doubt that innocent civilians are being targeted.
Members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have "openly, brazenly, and repeatedly" shared its "crimes" on social media, said Mansour.
Since the IDF began its bombardment of Gaza in October with political and material support from the United States and other Western countries, videos taken by Israeli soldiers themselves have shown the controlled detonation of Israa University, a soldier blowing up a mosque, and another IDF fighter giving a thumbs up while driving a bulldozer into a destroyed car, accompanied by the caption, "I stopped counting how many neighborhoods I've erased."
In a segment produced by Al Jazeera in March, Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now said that "there have been a remarkable number of videos posted by Israeli soldiers on social media, depicting themselves pillaging property, mocking the death and destruction that they are causing, and most egregiously, torturing, humiliating, and mocking detained Palestinian prisoners."
Meanwhile, human rights experts and aid groups have amplified images of the results of Israel's use of what Mansour called "the ultimate weapon": a near-total blockade on humanitarian relief. Last month, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documented the deaths from starvation of five-month-old Fayez Attaya and 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi—two of more than two dozen children who have perished as U.N. experts have warned famine has taken hold in Gaza.
"Two million people who were subjected to a 17-year-old blockade are now confronted with a hermetic siege, dying of hunger and disease while food and medicine are available only meters away," said Mansour on Wednesday.
Palestinians including Bisan Owda, a journalist who won a Peabody Award for her coverage, have also documented their own forced displacement, the destruction of their homes, and the loss of loved ones.
Mansour on Wednesday asked the Security Council—which only voted in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza in June, after U.S. officials had vetoed several resolutions—why it has allowed Israel to violate international laws and norms.
"What is a rule that's not enforced? What do these rules mean anymore when for nine months Israel has bombed the homes, hospitals, schools—including those designated as U.N. shelters—and now people in tents as is the case in al-Mawasi?" he asked.
Mansour emphasized that Israeli soldiers have good reason to think they can film themselves committing potential war crimes.
"Everything in [Israel's] history tells it it will get away with it," said the envoy. "It is betting this time will be no exception. But, this time must be the exception, and change must start right now."
Mansour added that the ICJ's pending ruling on the occupation of Palestine "should serve as basis for our collective action in the days to come."
"As all your nations have refused to forego their rights, the Palestinian people will never accept to relinquish theirs," he said. "Peace will not be achieved at the expense of our rights but by upholding them. The right to life, to liberty, and to dignity. That is the only path to peace. Let us finally collectively embark on it."
In their war on Gaza, the Israelis pulverized the educational sector in the enclave. There are no schools, no colleges and no universities due to the mass bombs deliberately targeting these institutions since 7 October, 2023.
Over 90,000 Palestinian university students in Gaza have no universities to go back to when the war ends. In the long-term the Israelis may want to create an illiterate population in the enclave which becomes easier to control.
Israel’s bombings have turned all of the 12 universities in the Strip into piles of rubble, campuses a wreck, student lecture halls no longer exist, tumbledown buildings have become the standard textbook cases of woes and misery underlined by running sewers and dirty water floods.
Besides, the mass attack on the higher educational system by Israeli warplanes targeted and killed nearly 100 Palestinian scholars, deans, scientists and professors, calling this criminal rampage as scholastide with the Israeli intention to destroy the whole system of education in the Gaza Strip as UN experts pointed out.
To demonstrate his outrage, Palestinian-American Dr Tariq Haddad refused to meet US Secretary Anthony Blinken after Israel killed 100 people from his family in its Gaza genocide. Among his family, included physicians and professors who were murdered wantonly.
The attack on the universities was a deliberate attempt to destroy Palestinian culture and learning. Al-Aqsa University in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, was completely destroyed, made dysfunctional by an Israeli regime that has long forgotten knowledge culture and civilization and seeking to instill a poverty of culture.
Al Aqsa University began to be destroyed slowly at the end of 2023. As Palestinians started to move in search of safe areas, they found Al Aqsa University. It had been turned into a place for the thousands of displaced people being forced out of their homes by Israeli warplanes.
Once the Israeli army started to hear of that, they increased the bombing of this institution accompanied by carnage, killing and mayhem.
The same is the case with the Islamic University in Gaza which was completely destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces.
The Islamic University was the biggest educational institution in Gaza, yet all of its faculties were completely destroyed soon after 7 October.
There are plenty of pictures that show “before and after” – a horrendous, vicious attack on educational learning.
One Israeli soldier relished his destructive work so much, he decided to film himself walking through Al Azhar University which now lies in a desolate, dilapidated state.
In a mock display, he walks among its ruins, saying the university is now closed for reconstruction and asking the Israeli soldiers who have now come to occupy its wrecked and debris-ridden halls, if they want to sign up for the new semester.
In remembrance of their destruction, Middle East Eye ran a piece on those higher learnings that once existed. Besides the Islamic University of Gaza and the Aqsa University, there was Al Israa University, Al Azhar University, Palestine Technical College, University College of Applied Sciences, University of Palestine, Gaza University, Hassan II University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences and Dar Al Kalima University.
But they’re all gone now. US Congressman Bernie Sanders tries to emphasize the point across to the US Senate about student protesters in US university campuses for the support of Palestine. He told Senators in Gaza there are no student protesters because every one of the 12 campuses there were destroyed by the Israelis.
Another Israeli soldier found it appropriate to take a selfie of himself behind bookshelves in Al Aqsa University which he just set on fire.
The rampage of the University which is located in Khan Younis, to the South of Gaza City, was the second largest city in Gaza, occupied for the best part of three months by the Israeli army in a bid to get rid of Hamas and Palestinian resistance fighters.
Israeli soldiers gave up last April and left. They hadn’t destroyed the resistance, but they decimated Khan Younis, its university, colleges and schools. It was pure terroristic vandalism.
The photo of the Israeli soldier went viral. It shows him holding a book while a fire burns behind him in the Al Aqsa University library that is one of the largest book depositories in the Gaza Strip.
Despite the killing of its doctors, nurses, computer scientists, engineers, teachers, lecturers, workers, journalists and many other professions, Palestinians are still hopeful about the “day after” when the war will end.
The image of 21-year-old Duaa from deep down Gaza is heartening. It is a call for the outside world to let her continue her studies despite the fact “…we are living in a state of occupation war that destroyed my home, my country, and my university…” she said.
And there are many like her which means the destroyed universities will be rebuilt one day and the educational system will be rebuilt and reconstituted despite the Israeli slaughter because Palestinians will not go anywhere accept stay in Gaza.
Dr Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based journalist covering Middle East affairs. He blogs at https://crossfirearabia.com/
Is this true? Seven Israeli soldiers pose for a group photo wearing the dresses of Palestinian women which they probably either killed or forced them to flee. Since the war on Gaza last October, soldiers would invade these homes and try out their dresses, underwear, bras and more in sick humiliating paradigms of jokes that show a prevailing Israeli sick mind.
The images of these soldiers, who proudly continue to take selfies of themselves have long flooded the internet. So when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the Israeli army is the most ‘moral’ one in the world, he is clearly deluding himself and won’t see what is in front of him.
This war have shown a sense of madness among the israeli military machine as one soldier says how proud he is for killing Palestinian children.
“If you show me your t*tties I won’t kill anymore Palestinian kids,” the soldier shouts in one of the video as if there is a dare element. Videos have shown time and again they don’t care about what they are doing even if their military commanders, their politicians and the world knows.
Question: How can Israelis look at themselves after this war? Haaretz states that since this war began at least 10 Israeli soldiers committed suicide no doubt because of what they have done in this war that slaughtered over 35,000 people so far and injured over 80,000.
The video of the slain woman with her daughter tells of the stark Israeli atrocities. She was killed by an Israeli drone in central Gaza. The woman’s leg and arm were cut off. She was found by a Palestinian medical team after two days on the pavement. Appeals are being made if anyone knows of this woman and her daughter to go to the Baptist Hospital.
“It’s as if the soldier in the control room was taking delight in directing the drone on which parts of the body to shoot. Can you believe that?”
One should ask Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: ‘Who are the real animals, women and children or the smiling Israeli soldiers taking selfies of themselves while committing acts of murder.”
But does Gallant have the real brain to think or is it just willful, determined, civilian murder? Or is it just keep killing in the hope that the Palestinian Question would end, go away and be trampled on.
Head of the Israeli National Council Tzachi Hanegbi has admitted Israeli defeat when he told the Knesset’s Security and Foreign Committee, last Wednesday, that: Israel has not achieved any of the strategic goals of the war on Gaza, hasn’t brought back the hostages, nor eradicated Hamas nor have allowed the Israelis surrounding the Gaza enclave to return to their homes.
But will Netanyahu relent on the killing fields? Will he be a man, sit at the table, negotiate and end one of the world’s most destructive wars.
Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs
The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars.
All of this coming after the first pandemic in living memory, one that claimed the lives of a million Americans. And after the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in history, provoked by the first president who refused to accept electoral defeat.
Perhaps most troubling, the nation is bitterly split. Americans are demonizing those on the other side whom they disagree with. (For two weeks in April, “Civil War,” a dystopian film about a bloody alternative reality where America is at war with itself, topped box office charts, grossing more than $50 million.)
My graduating student are exhausted and anxious.
They are repulsed by the slaughter in Gaza, and angry by the responses of university administrators around the country to the student protesters.
They’re cynical about politics.
They tell me they don’t want to have children and bring them into a world imperiled by conflict and climate change and authoritarianism.
They have lived through mass shootings and culture wars.
They recall a Trump administration spewing hate and bigotry and giving tax cuts to the wealthy, and fear another President Trump who’s even less constrained.
I tell them that the year I graduated from college, in 1968, America also felt tremulous and chaotic. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. American cities were burning.
And the Vietnam War was claiming the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
I was appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.
I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.
American was deeply split. My graduation speaker urged us to resist the draft and seek refuge in Canada. His words caused parents in the crowd to boo. I saw several engage in fistfights.
The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order.” The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.
I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.
As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching,” network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.
I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, America elected Richard Nixon as president.
I wondered whether the nation could sink any lower. How could we survive?
I ask my students to hold on. To use their lives and careers to make America better. To try to heal the world.
History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.
The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway.
Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but they are loud and they are not Columbia students. They’ve been coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side, equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas, and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.
Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.
The Real Story on Campus
Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)
As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.
Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.
Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.
The Right Seizes and Distorts the Narrative
Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread antisemitism to take eyes off the astronomical death toll in Gaza — more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than 14,500 of them children — while fretting about the safety of Jewish students instead.
The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously and we have methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness.”
Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too. Some students even reported they were sprayed with a mace-like material, possibly manufactured by the Israeli military, and that, as a result, several protesters had to go to the hospital. My own students told me they have been targeted with hate mail and threats over social media. I even saw a doxxing truck sponsored by the far-right group Accuracy in Media driving around the Columbia neighborhood bearing photographs of Muslim students, naming them and calling them terrorists. Again, it’s important to note that most of the harassers have been outsiders, not students.
No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.
Then came the Republican hearings.
The Congressional Hearings
Having watched the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania stumble and fall in the face of MAGA Representative Elise Stefanik’s bullying accusations of antisemitism in December, Columbia President Shafik did all she could to avoid a similar fate when it was her turn. But when she submitted to four hours of McCarthyite-style questioning in Congress on April 17th — one Republican even asked if there were Republicans among the faculty — Shafik cringed, evaded, and caved.
“I agree with you” was her most frequent phrase. She never pushed back against the characterization of the Columbia campus by Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx and Stefanik as riddled with antisemitism. She never stood up for the integrity of our faculty and students or for the fact that we’re a campus full of remarkable scholars and artists perfectly capable of governing ourselves. She never even pointed out that who we suspend, fire, or hire is none of Congress’s business. Instead, she broke all our university rules by agreeing to investigate and fire members of our own faculty and to call in the police when she deemed it necessary.
The very day after the hearings, that’s exactly what she did.
Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza was never even mentioned.
A Pandora’s Box
Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote outraged opinion pieces condemning Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest students, more students than ever joined the protests all over the country.
Then, on April 24th, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some kind of terrible riot had gone on here. Standing at the top of the steps in front of the grand facade of Low Library, a century-old building meant to symbolize learning and reason, and surrounded by heckling students, Johnson declared that some Jewish students had told him of “heinous acts of bigotry,” characterized the protesters as “endorsed by Hamas,” and called for Shafik to resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to the chaos.”
“What chaos?” said an undergraduate standing next to me on the steps as we listened.
“He’s saying a bunch of 20-year-old American college students are in cahoots with Hamas?” another asked incredulously.
Johnson then escalated the threats, claiming the National Guard might be called in and that Congress might even revoke federal funding if universities couldn’t keep such protests under control.
I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.” These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly, “We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.” Designated faculty and students stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging media. But nobody and nothing was out of control.
The Weaponization of Antisemitism
Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole, not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too, including President Biden and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, not to speak of New York Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat. They have all publicly condemned the supposedly rampant antisemitism on campus without, it seems, bothering to check their facts.
Meanwhile, MAGA Christian Nationalist Sean Feuchtposted on X that “Columbia has been taken over by radical Pro-Hamas protesters.”
Back in the real world, the right’s hysteria over such supposed antisemitism hasn’t really been about protecting Jews at all, as many faculty members (including us Jewish ones) have written and spoken about. Rather, the right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country Christian, conservative, straight, and white — not to mention their urge to suppress support of Palestinian autonomy.
When Students Don’t Feel Safe
My students tell me they feel perfectly safe on campus. They may not like some of the chants they sometimes hear. I myself have caught a few that chilled me as a Jew. I’ve also heard chants that sicken me on behalf of my Muslim friends. But those have been rare. And campus is a place where everyone should be free to debate, disagree, express their opinions, listen, and learn. We have to remember that free speech does not mean speech we agree with.
No, where my students do not feel safe is out on Broadway, where extremists on both sides gather. They don’t feel safe when the false narratives of Republican politicians draw far-right angry mobs to the campus gates, something that is happening just as I’m writing this piece. Most of all, they don’t feel safe when police arrive on campus with guns in their holsters and zip-ties hanging from their belts.
I stood and watched that day the police came. Four huge drones hovered overhead, along with those eternally buzzing helicopters. Dozens of police buses were lined up on West 114th Street on the south side of campus as if prepared to deal with some massive, violent riot. Then, in came the police, some in riot gear, to tie the hands of more than 100 students behind their backs and march them onto police buses.
Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones who attend Barnard were locked out of their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague downstairs. “Nobody told our parents that we were being evicted,” she told me in my lobby.
Faculty Response
Many faculty were so shocked by these events that on Monday, April 22nd, some 300 of us gathered on the steps of Low Library, holding up signs that said, “Hands Off Our Students” and “End Student Suspensions Now.” Several professors gave impassioned speeches praising those students for their courage, demanding that academic freedom be protected, and castigating Shafik for throwing us all under the bus.
Still, Gaza was not mentioned. It seemed as if the genocide occurring there was disappearing in the fog.
“I’m worried that the message of our protest is getting lost,” that suspended student told me as we spoke in the lobby. “Everyone’s talking about academic freedom and police repression instead.”
Indeed, not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this debate, so are the student protesters’ demands, so let me reiterate them here:
That Columbia divest of all investments that profit from Israel’s occupation and bombing of Palestine.
That Columbia sever academic ties with its programs at Tel Aviv and other Israeli Universities.
That the policing of the campus be stopped immediately.
That the university release a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The other day, on New York’s National Public Radio station, WNYC, I heard a caller who had been a campus protester in 1968 say something like, “It’s funny how the protesters of 50 years ago are always right, but the protesters of today are always wrong.” The people who demonstrated for civil rights then were demonized, beaten, even murdered, but they were right, he pointed out, as were the people who demonstrated against the Vietnam War. (I would say the same for those who protested against the Iraq War and for the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.)
One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side, too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.
Final Note: This piece was written before the president and trustees of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30th, against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos show considerable police violence against the students. What happens next remains to be seen.
Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 other books of fiction and nonfiction.
