At least 28 Palestinian artists and writers have been killed since the beginning of Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza. It is a number that is easy to lose sight of given the wider horrifying reality of the war for Palestinians: more than 35,000 dead in total and two million displaced. Ten thousand bodies that have yet to be recovered from under the rubble – rubble that, according to the UN, will take 14 years to clear.

But it is a number on which we should pause. Those 28 artists and writers represent a cultural devastation. There are names on that list that, as a student and teacher of Palestinian literature, I once assigned as reading. And their deaths come amid the destruction of every single institution of higher education in Gaza, as well as archives, libraries, museums, cultural centres and archaeological treasures, in what has been described as a ‘cultural genocide’ taking place alongside an actual genocide.