Urgent Support Gaza Monologues Writers, Palestine

Dear Friends,

Many of us have asked how else you can help. Let me start answering this urgent question through these three ideas and suggestions:

- Monthly support: small recurring gifts keep a writer from the Gaza Monologues group feeling even more supported

- Hosting a reading:we will share the current text and resources pack shortly (Arabic originals and translations), a simple agreement and guidance, and a donations QR.

- Match funding / corporate partners:help us work more structurally and strategically

Over the last three months, The Gaza Monologues has continued to move across borders, which is a living archive of testimony, resilience, and creative defiance. From Gaza to Cairo, from Europe to Latin America and the Pacific, people have gathered to read, perform, and listen. Each performance, whether in a village square or an international theatre, carries the same intention: to remember, to witness, and to speak truth aloud.

Between August and October 2025, ASHTAR Theatre coordinated and supported more than twenty-one readings, performances, and artistic initiatives in sixteen countries. Some were intimate, candlelit gatherings in community spaces; others filled large theatres or festivals with audiences of hundreds. Together, they formed a global chorus of empathy and awareness.

In Fiji, the Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network organized an educational reading in Suva. In Jakarta, the Literature and Ideas Festival (Salihara) featured the Monologues within Indonesia’s leading literary event. In London, four major theatre companies: Tamasha Theatre, Gate Theatre, New Earth Theatre, and Paines Plough, hosted a collective reading followed by a public dialogue on art’s role in moral responsibility. In Sauve, France, Simsalabim Productions filled a 16th-century temple with live Palestinian music and readings in Arabic, English, and French. Meanwhile, in Berlin and Vienna, a local artist created an immersive audio walk with the Gaza Monologues.

"Art lets us feel what facts can’t."
From a member of Te Nel Deserto Group, Italy (quoted in GlobalGiving Viewpoints, Oct 13, 2025)

In Kenya, Playreading Nairobi staged a public reading as part of a growing East African network of performance exchange. Across digital spaces, Beyond the Hill Productions in Germany launched a “19 Days – 19 Voices” online series, while the Venice International Performance Art Week released daily videos featuring international artists reading from the New Gaza Monologues 2024. In Peru, India, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic, new audiences discovered the power of the words.

While the international movement expanded, ASHTAR’s work with Gaza’s displaced writers deepened. In September, three Gaza writers who fled to Cairo began mentoring a group of twenty displaced children. Under the direction of ASHTAR Theatre, they guided the children through the same process that created The Gaza Monologues fifteen years ago, transforming trauma into written testimony and testimony into art. Over the course of a month, the children wrote and performed their own monologues in Arabic, which were later translated into English by ASHTAR’s team.

“Three of our Gaza writers worked with twenty children who fled to Cairo. They repeated the same creative process of The Gaza Monologues. The young people wrote their monologues, which we translated into English.”
Iman Aoun, Artistic Director, ASHTAR Theatre

The resulting texts are raw and intimate. These children have become the new authors of Gaza’s story, carrying forward a legacy of theatre as survival and truth.

“The purpose is one - to make their voices heard.”
Iman Aoun, ASHTAR Theatre (2025)

ASHTAR is now working to present these new monologues internationally, connecting young people in Canada and elsewhere with Gaza’s youth through creative exchange. The purpose is not only to showcase art, but to reclaim presence: to say: we exist, we speak, we will not disappear.

Your support through GlobalGiving has made this continuity possible. It has provided direct assistance to writers inside Gaza, ensuring access to food, medicine, and communication tools, while also funding translation, documentation, and the coordination of this vast network of international solidarity. Without your generosity, these writers - and the children they now mentor - would have been even more cut off from the world.

Since August, the project has reached audiences in Arabic, English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Czech, Polish, Dutch, and Indonesian. Funds raised by partner events have supported the Gaza Monologues Writers’ Fund, ASHTAR’s psycho-social drama programs in UNRWA schools, and the theatre’s core operational needs. Every donation sustains a global act of listening.

“They remind us that even in the desert, voices rise. And if you ever find yourself doubting the power of your action, don’t. Doubt is promoted by those who are threatened by your power.”
From a letter by Konrad Suder Chatterjee to Te Nel Deserto (quoted in GlobalGiving Viewpoints, Oct 13, 2025)

In the coming months, ASHTAR will publish the children’s monologues, launch a Global Reading of the Gaza Monologues Call uniting its partners worldwide, and expand its psychosocial theatre activities for children in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. The new texts will join ASHTAR’s digital archive, ensuring that these words - born of struggle - remain part of the world’s collective conscience.

Through your solidarity, Gaza’s writers and children continue to create. They teach us that art, even amid destruction, is a form of resilience, resistance, and remembrance.

You have helped turn loss and grief into witness, and witness into voice.

Thank you for keeping The Gaza Monologues alive for listening, for believing, and for standing with Gaza’s storytellers.

Links:

• Truth reaches even deserts