Urgent Support Gaza Monologues Writers, Palestine

Dear Friends,

I want to share a more grounded update with you about what this support has meant in practice.

At ASHTAR Theatre, we remain in direct contact with the vast majority of the Gaza Monologues writers. Some are still in Gaza. Some are displaced. Some are in Egypt. All of them continue to live with instability, uncertainty, and the pressure of trying to survive conditions that no one should have to survive.

Your support has helped us stay close, responsive, and useful.

This fund is not abstract to us. It is part of an ongoing relationship with people we have known for years, writers whose words travelled the world, and who are now trying to continue living, caring for others, and making sense of life under genocide, displacement, and loss.

One important part of our work has been not only offering emergency financial assistance when possible, but also creating work opportunities for Gaza Monologues writers through ASHTAR’s psycho-social drama programme. Whenever conditions allow, we work with them as trainers and facilitators in communities across different areas of Gaza. This matters deeply to us.

It means that support is not only about charity or short-term relief. It is also about dignity, continuity, and recognising these writers not only as recipients of aid, but as artists, educators, and community workers with something vital to offer.

This has also continued beyond Gaza itself. In Cairo, three of the original Gaza Monologues writers trained and facilitated a group of evacuated Gazan children, guiding them through a creative process that led them to write and develop their own texts. In many ways, this became the next generation of the Gaza Monologues writers. It was moving not only because of the texts themselves, but because of the continuity: writers who once transformed their own experience into testimony are now supporting younger displaced Palestinians to do the same.

We are also continuing to workshop with members of the original group so that they can keep writing. Their voices did not end in 2010, or 2014, or 2024. They are still developing, still reflecting, still producing new texts in the midst of conditions that try to crush every possibility of artistic and human continuation. One of these texts is attached to this report.

Some of the needs we respond to are urgent and immediate. Others speak to the attempt to preserve a future.

For one writer, for example, support is currently needed to help cover her husband’s Master’s degree fees in ophthalmology. This is not a secondary detail. In times like these, education, qualification, and the ability of a family to hold onto a profession and a future are part of survival too. It is one more example of how varied and deeply personal these needs can be.

For others, the priorities remain food, water, medicine, rent, transport, communication costs, or support for children and elderly relatives. In some cases, what is needed most is simply a way to remain reachable and connected, so that we can continue to respond quickly when things change again.

At the same time, the international life of The Gaza Monologues has not stopped.

Readings, performances, artistic interventions, and solidarity events have continued to emerge across countries, languages, and communities. These initiatives help raise funds, yes, but they also do something else that matters just as much: they keep the writers present in the world. They refuse the disappearance that genocide tries to impose. They insist that these voices are not historical material or symbolic content. They are living people, many of whom we are still speaking to directly.

That is part of what your support makes possible too.

It allows us to continue coordinating this network of solidarity while also staying accountable to the writers themselves. It helps us move between immediate response and longer-term accompaniment. It lets us support survival, but also visibility, authorship, and the continuation of cultural work under conditions designed to destroy it.

There is no neat ending to this update, because there is no neat situation on the ground.

The needs remain urgent. The pressure remains immense. But the connection also remains.

We are still with them. They are still here. They are still writing, facilitating, helping others, and trying to endure.

Thank you for making it possible for us to remain in this relationship with care, flexibility, and commitment.

Please continue to stand with the writers of The Gaza Monologues.

With gratitude and solidarity,

Konrad with the entire team at ASHTAR Theatre 

Konrad Suder Chatterjee
Communications Manager and Resource Developer
ASHTAR Theatre, Palestine

Links:

• A recorded version of Ali Abu Yassin recent monologue...

• A deeply touching text from 2026... (PDF)