“An Unfinished Cake”: Journalist Mohammad Bahaeddine Ahmad Documents Gaza War Through His Daughter’s Birthday

Exclusive / Shehab

The story of “An Unfinished Cake” by Palestinian writer and journalist Mohammad Bahaeddine Ahmad begins with a small family detail that was supposed to be an occasion for joy, before the war turned it into the start of a long journey of displacement, loss, injury and hunger. On October 7, 2023, Ahmad was preparing with his wife to celebrate their daughter Jannar’s birthday, but the outbreak of the war scattered the preparations and opened a different path for the family, one whose end they did not know.

A collective reality

The novel is published by SAD Publishing and Distribution and was presented at cultural events, including the 2026 Algiers International Book Fair. It revisits the author’s experience during the war on Gaza, bringing together the details of his personal life and his field journalism as a correspondent for TRT Arabi, and the reality Palestinians lived in the northern Strip — bombardment, destruction, displacement and famine — in an attempt to document the events of the war from a human angle that starts from an individual experience and connects to a collective reality.

Ahmad told Shehab that the novel began on his daughter’s birthday, which the family was unable to celebrate, and then expanded to document the events that followed, from his departure from home and separation from his family because of his journalistic work, to his family’s displacement three days after the war began, after his uncle’s house was targeted and the family home was damaged.

Ahmad explained that his journalistic career, which he began in 2006 in photography before moving to production management at Shehab News Agency, and then working as a correspondent for a number of satellite channels when the war on Gaza began, culminating in TRT Arabic, gave him the opportunity to live the events and document them from different locations.

He said that his move to writing gave him a wider space to express his personal experience and feelings during the war, away from the nature of television work, which requires him to focus on conveying facts and providing information. He explained that the book gave him a chance to narrate what he lived in his own language and to summon the impact the events left on him, instead of merely documenting them in news reports.

He noted that the book’s pages review multiple stages of the war, from bombardment, massacres and famine to killings at checkpoints and in areas that turned into death traps, including the Netzarim and Zikim areas, whose names have become associated with bloody scenes in Palestinian memory.

A written testimony

Ahmad added that his motivation to write was not limited to documenting his personal experience, but also stemmed from a sense that he needed to leave a written testimony that preserves what happened in Gaza and documents the conditions under which Palestinian journalists and media workers operated during the war, conveying people’s suffering to the world amid risks to their lives.

He stressed that journalists were not merely transmitters of events, but lived their details and were part of their harsh reality, pointing out that through the book he wanted to leave a written trace documenting their experience and preserving their testimony to what Gaza witnessed during the war.

The novel addresses many details of his journalistic work in northern Gaza, his coverage of bombardment, destruction and human stories, and the hunger, famine, homelessness and sleeping in the streets in search of a safe place that accompanied it. It also recounts his injury during the war and his attempts to find a place to receive treatment as the medical system in the northern Strip went out of service, along with field stations including raids on hospitals and the flour massacres, and the loss and suffering residents lived through.

In his novel, the writer follows the field transformations the Strip witnessed, from the Generals’ Plan in northern Gaza to Operation Gideon’s Chariots 1 in the northern Strip and Gideon’s Chariots 2 in Gaza City, and the displacement southward that accompanied them. He also documents the detention of his brother Islam, who was released with the announcement of the ceasefire agreement in October 2025.

The novel does not only record the major events of the war, but also summons the personal details that accompanied the writer’s life during that period: from his fear for his family and his anxiety for his loved ones to moments of joy linked to his first professional achievements, such as completing his first television report and delivering his first live broadcast, down to the experience of writing itself as a means of preserving what he lived and witnessed.

We are the ordinary people

In a critical reading of the novel at its launch event in Gaza, writer and journalist Fares Yousef said that the novel’s author “resembles us, the ordinary people,” noting that his language, his innocent dreams, and the details of his fatherhood, fear and celebration of his own achievements reflect aspects of the life of an ordinary human being trying to hold on to his small details despite the war.

Yousef dwelt on the author’s celebration of his professional achievements, from his first television report and first live broadcast to the day of writing, considering that the novel blends personal dreams with collective ones and gives human details a space amid scenes of death and destruction.

The speaker invoked the poem “I Have a Boat in the Sea” by the poet Mourid Barghouti, asking: “Is all this death devoid of resurrection?” before linking the novel’s experience to what he described as personal resurrections and victories that Palestinians continue to celebrate despite pain and loss.

From a birthday whose cake was never completed, Mohammad Bahaeddine Ahmad builds a narrative in which the family’s story intersects with the journalist’s experience and the testimony of a man who lived the war in the field.

The occasion that was aborted on its first day becomes an entry point for documenting a journey that extended from bombardment and displacement to injury and loss, and for recovering the details of daily life that never stopped trying to find a space for joy amid the war.