160 pgs. B&W | $25.99 hardcover | W: Chris Hedges A: Joe Sacco
The American experience of war is mostly of something that takes place elsewhere and doesn’t result in American civilian casualties or disrupt daily life in the United States. To live in a war zone is something quite different: the possibility of death is always present, there are likely shortages of food, medicine, and other necessary goods, and atrocities happen not to people in the abstract but to your neighbors and maybe you as well.
I wouldn’t wish the firsthand experience of war on anyone, but citizens of countries that commit aggressive actions toward other countries should at least try to broaden their understanding of what living in a war zone means. After all, our tax dollars are paying for it and it’s our elected representatives that decide what to do with them. The best way to gain that insight is by listening, with an open heart, to people who do have those experiences, and to consume literature and art (including movies) informed by them.
That’s just what you get in Requiem for Gaza by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, a book using both text and comics to convey the experiences of 29 Palestinian families who had recently left Gaza, based on 2025 interviews conducted in Cairo with those families. It’s full of horrifying, heart-wrenching stories, because it’s true to the experiences of those families and hasn’t been cleaned up for easy consumption or censored to make anyone feel better.
Requiem for Gaza is about three-quarters prose, including extensive notes and bibliography (facts are carefully sourced and cited), with two main comics sections and graphics used to introduce each chapter. The art is in Sacco’s familiar detailed, realistic style, and as in previous books he uses a variety of layouts to create an immersive experience for the reader. In truth, I would have liked more art and less prose, in part because there’s something uniquely powerful about seeing a story as opposed to just reading about it, but I’m sure Sacco and Hedges had reasons for the proportion of words to art that they chose.
Sacco and Hedges make an ideal team to tell this story. Sacco essentially created the field of comics journalism and won the National Book Award for his work documenting the experiences of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (later collected in the 2001 book Palestine). Conveying the civilian experience in areas experiencing civil or international conflicts is something of a specialty for him, as he has also written two volumes covering aspects of the Bosnia War (Safe Area Goradze in 2001 and The Fixer in 2003), one about sectarian violence in Uttar Pradesh (The Once and Future Riot, 2025), and several more on Gaza as well.
Hedges is a former Middle Eastern bureau chief for the New York Times and winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his work covering global terrorism. He’s worked with Sacco once before: their previous book together, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), looks at life in parts of America ravaged by unchecked capitalism, including coal mining communities in Appalachia, agricultural workers in Florida, former industrial areas in New Jersey, and residents of Native American reservations.
When reading about a situation such as that in Gaza, my first thought is that surely the world will intervene against this injustice. Then I remember that I felt the same way when reading Logavina Street (about the Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1996) and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (about the 1994 Rwandan genocide), watching Schindler’s List (about the Jewish Holocaust, 1941-1945) and The Promise (about the Armenian genocide, 1915-1916). Or, for an example closer to home, while watching Selma (about the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., 1954-1968).My point being that atrocities are not uncommon in the history of the world, nearly everyone is willing to ignore them as long as possible, and hardly anyone with real power cares about justice in the abstract. Artists and journalists can’t stop atrocities, but they can help see that they’re not forgotten and that some of the perpetrators will be brought to justice. It’s not enough, but sometimes it’s all you can get. | Sarah Boslaugh
You can see a sample of the artwork for Requiem for Gaza here.
