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Chris Hedges: Israel Cannot Be Allowed to Erase Gaza’s Stories

SCHEERPOST, November 3, 2026, Joshua Scheer

Genocide seeks to destroy not only a people but the memory of their lives. Speaking on his Requiem for Gaza book tour, Hedges describes how he and illustrator Joe Sacco interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had escaped to Egypt, documenting the destruction through the people forced to endure it. He recounts testimony about doctors and journalists being targeted and argues that the assault extends beyond killing and demolished buildings to the destruction of a people’s history, culture and memory.

A child’s exam paper. A wedding album pulled from the rubble. A teddy bear left behind when a family flees its home. These are the fragments of Palestinian life Chris Hedges brings before his audience—evidence of people whose hopes, routines and relationships disappear behind the bloodless language of military briefings. In this talk, the distance between that language and the lives it conceals becomes unbearable.

Then he reads the story of a family briefly returning home during a ceasefire. Children carefully put away their toys, as though good behavior might allow them to stay. A mother confronts the birthday-party list still on her kitchen whiteboard and mourns a sister killed with her husband and their four children. Elsewhere, relatives search the rubble for bodies, buy fuel to keep an excavator running and bury their loved ones in curtains because there are no shrouds.

These lives demand more than the ritual expressions of concern that allow governments to acknowledge suffering while evading responsibility. Drawing on decades of war reporting, Hedges insists on the obligation to preserve the evidence and the names: so the dead cannot be reduced to disputed statistics, and those responsible cannot later claim that nobody knew.

The transcript of Chris Hedges’ remarks appears below ON ORIGINAL – https://scheerpost.com/2026/11/03/chris-hedges-israel-cannot-be-allowed-to-erase-gazas-stories/

November 6, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Gaza, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties