I will preserve Lubna’s memory in the best way I know — by writing music in her memory, in memory of her dream, in memory of her passion, in memory of the future stolen from her.

Despite unbearable conditions under Israeli siege, youth from the Gaza Strip won many of the categories in this year’s prestigious Palestine National Music Competition. In seeking to explain this Ayman El-Hallaq writes, “Music, as far as I think, to such a group of Gazan children is more than a collection of melodies to be played on musical instruments; it is a way of survival, it has a healing effect as a treatment that soothes the injuries of life in Gaza.”

Suhail Khoury, director of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and his wife, Rania Elias, director of Jerusalem’s Yabous Cultural Centre, were taken by Israeli authorities from their home in the Beit Hanina area of occupied East Jerusalem on July 22 and held and interrrogated that day. Israel is “using brute force to extinguish cultural life,” says a former colleague of Khoury’s.