On 22 October 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit Ahmed Alnaouq’s home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, killing 21 members of his family, including his 75-year-old father, two brothers, three sisters and all of their children.

At the time, Alnaouq was living in London, where he works as a journalist and human rights activist. “It crushed me,” he says of the attack. Unable to return home, he could only watch helplessly from afar and grieve alone. Later, he tells me that it’s not anger or hate that consumes him now, but survivor’s guilt. “All the time I think: ‘Why? Why am I alive? Why wasn’t I killed with my family?’”

The only reason he can think of, he says, is so that he could tell their story to the world.

Eight years earlier, Alnaouq had co-founded a platform to help young Palestinians in Gaza write about their lives for an international audience. It began in the aftermath of another airstrike that had claimed the lives of his older brother Ayman and four of his friends during the seven-week Gaza war in the summer of 2014.

“That incident struck me very, very hard,” he tells me quietly from his office in London. “I sank into a deep depression. I wanted to die. I really, genuinely was waiting for the moment that I die so I can join my brother and just get rid of this life.” Numbly, he watched more deaths being reported in the media – six, eight, 10 more Palestinians killed – with very little sense of the flesh-and-blood people behind the numbers.

Then someone he’d met in Gaza a few years earlier, an American journalist and activist named Pam Bailey, messaged Alnaouq on Facebook asking how he was. “I told her: ‘I’m fine’. She said: ‘No, tell me something real. Tell me how you feel after losing your brother.’ So I told her the truth. I told her I’m very, very depressed. I’m spending all my time at my brother’s grave. When I’m all alone, I burst out crying.”

In an effort to help him work through his depression and grief, Bailey suggested that Alnaouq write a story about his brother in English. “At first, I said no. My English wasn’t very good.” But eventually he agreed. It took them three months – Alnaouq writing drafts, Bailey sending back detailed edits – to get the story into shape. When it was ready, Bailey published it online.

“That changed my life,” says Alnaouq. “For the first time, I received messages of sympathy and support from people outside Gaza. In my mind, I thought that all westerners don’t like the Palestinians. They don’t want to read our stories. But that proved me wrong. It boosted my confidence and made me feel I was wrong when I said there is no hope in this life.”

Impressed by the impact of their endeavour, Alnaouq and Bailey had another idea: “Why don’t we replicate this experience for other Palestinians who lost loved ones in Gaza? Why don’t we create a platform where young people can tell their stories in English and share them with the world?”, says Alnaouq. They called the platform We Are Not Numbers (WANN).

It started in 2015 with 20 budding writers – many of them English literature students such as Alnaouq – aided by volunteer mentors from around the world. They wrote of hardship and loss, of feelings of anger and despair and dread in the face of recurring Israeli attacks. They also wrote about the things they loved about their homeland, despite the blockade on Gaza, the scarcity of jobs, the worsening poverty. “We encouraged our young writers to write about the beauty of the place,” says Alnaouq. “About how people in Gaza are friendly and hospitable, about the culture, the mosques, churches and cemeteries – about all aspects of life.” The aim, as well as providing a form of therapy for traumatised young people along with vital connections to the outside world, was to “break the stereotypes” about Gaza for an international audience accustomed to seeing “this dusty, horrible place” on the news.

The project took off. “We were amazed by how talented young writers in Gaza were,” says Alnaouq. “Every six months, we would recruit another 20 or 30. We would train them to write and help with their English. Over the past 10 years, we’ve published more than 1,500 stories and poems.” Among their alumni are the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha and the Al Jazeera journalist Hind Khoudary.

Now, Alnaouq and Bailey have collected 74 standout pieces from the past decade in a moving book entitled We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth (Naomi Klein described it as “a jailbreak and a miracle”; Riz Ahmed found it “impossible to put down or forget”). Each chapter covers a year, with big events refracted through highly personal lenses. In 2015, after the devastation of the previous summer’s war, one writer, Nada Hammad, observes the “canvas of grey” across Gaza slowly giving way to “small splashes of colour” – a wall painted white, graffiti sprouting across temporary housing. “It was a declaration of survival,” Hammad writes, “not a struggle to forget.”

Subsequent years bring further violence and disruption, but also efforts to live normally amid the chaos. One writer describes his friend’s attempts to pursue his love of astronomy in a land without readily available telescopes. We hear about the byzantine complexity of online shopping amid the blockade and the dismay of a young woman who relocates from Abu Dhabi with her family only to find sand in the shower water and power cuts lasting 18 hours. Her initial dislike of her parents’ homeland gradually softens into respect for its people who excel in figuring out “how to thrive with very little”.

By the time of the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, Alnaouq was living in the UK. He had moved over in 2019 on a prestigious Chevening scholarship to do a journalism master’s degree in Leeds. After graduating, he worked at the Palestinian embassy in London. Then he took over from Bailey as WANN’s international director, overseeing the daily running of the organisation. (He also hosts a podcast called Palestine Deep Dive and travels widely to give talks.)

On 22 October 2023, came the Israeli bombardment that killed 21 members of his family.

This time, unlike 2014, Alnaouq had a way of communicating his loss with a global audience. “When this bombing happened, I went to social media immediately and started voicing about what happened to my family and I received a lot of media attention.” The response spurred him on to expand WANN’s reach beyond the internet. “We thought: ‘Now is our chance. Not only will we have our stories online but we will put them in a book, so that more people will understand what’s happening.’” Four contributors, including Alnaouq’s brother Mahmoud, have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. “It’s our duty that we make their stories immortal, on paper.”

The war hasn’t stopped young people in Gaza from writing about their experiences; if anything, it’s intensified their need to communicate. “Now we publish maybe three times more stories than before,” says Alnaouq. “Most of our writers lost their homes. They lost their laptops. They don’t have electricity or internet connection. But they write their stories on their phones, wait a few days for internet connection and then submit them to us. Every month we publish 35 to 40 stories.”

“We’re chronicling history in Gaza, not by facts and statistics and news stories, but by the lived experiences of the people. It’s not a political project: it’s a human project.”

• We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply