For the reader: a warning and instructions for use

'Stay human' is the motto with which I sign off my pieces for Il Manifesto and for the entries on my blog. It's an invitation, or, better still, a prompt, to desist from the commission of criminal acts and to reaffirm and take possession of the original purposes of humankind instead. Once boundaries, flags, barriers, latitudes and ethno-religious differences have been abolished, what breaks onto the scene of life is a scenario stripped of the impulse to preserve one's own kin at the expense of others. Mine is an invitation to remember our belonging to a sole community of living beings: the human family.

Gaza: Stay Human is now also a book. Please find within the three-week story of a massacre, written to the best of my ability, more often than not in very precarious conditions, often scribbling about the inferno all around me in a tattered notebook while crouched in an ambulance screaming down the street. Or frantically tapping away at the keyboard of any available computer I could find, often inside a building shaking like a crazed pendulum as explosions went off all around. I must warn you that leafing through this book could prove dangerous. These are harmful pages, blood-stained, imbued with white phosphorous, and as sharp as bomb shrapnel. If read within the quiet of a bedroom, your walls will shake from our cries of terror. I feel concerned for the walls of your hearts, which I recognize have not yet become soundproofed to pain.

Please store this volume somewhere safe, within the reach of the young, so that they may immediately learn of a world not so far away from them, where indifference and racism tears their peers to little bits as if they were mere rag dolls. This way they may be inoculated against racism from an early age, against any epidemic of violence towards whoever is different, or against neutrality when faced with injustice. Gaza: Stay Human aims to float beyond other books written about, in and around Palestine thanks to the creative fire that has begotten it: the keen will of this author to involve, enlighten and heighten the reader's awareness of what atrocious inhumanities unfolded during those 22 days of a massacre. This is my small contribution towards preventing similar massacres from ever taking place in future. Giving the dead some justice and safeguarding tomorrow's mortally wounded.

Please help yourself to a ticket for a tour of hell that even the poet Dante Alighieri could not have conceived of when waking up from his pillow, full of nightmares. I entertain the hope of having been a good guide throughout to this hell, like Dante's Charon, the ferryman of Hades, of having been as faithful and as humane as possible in my narration. Standing in the rubble of a freshly-bombed building or in the ward of a Gaza hospital, I'm aware that it was sometimes difficult to recognize human features in what was once a face, now mutated, reduced to a pulp by devastating weaponry that is mostly banned by all international conventions. My account strives for the greatest possible objectivity. As it happens, I was myself an object, or target, of the Israeli army and also received death threats from a group of neo-Nazis connected with some settler groups. For whomsoever is still in doubt, months after the massacre, my account and the details recorded underneath a storm of bombs have been backed up by all the most reliable human rights organizations, whether governmental or otherwise, as well as by Israeli soldiers themselves, who have recently started to confess the crimes they have committed. In time, Gaza: Stay Human will become increasingly more like an historic document rather than...