Running Orders
Written during Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tuffaha's poem answers the phone call no one should receive — the one that says your house is next — and asks what courtesy means in a prison by the sea.
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Recording: WordsWest Literary Series
They call us now. Before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.”
(excerpt)
About this poem
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha wrote “Running Orders” in July 2014, during Israel’s seven-week assault on Gaza, after reports that the Israeli military was telephoning families — the caller introducing himself as “David” — to tell them they had minutes before their homes would be bombed. Shared online, the poem spread around the world within days; it has since been translated into Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Norwegian, and performed at anti-war protests.
The poem was collected in Tuffaha’s debut book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, and anthologized in Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Verso, 2015).
Sources
Connected in the archive
2 connected records2 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
written by — 1 record
- Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "lena-khalaf-tuffaha" → Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The poem was collected in Tuffaha's debut book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, and anthologized in Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Verso, 2015).
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Running Orders — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/running-orders.- MLA
“Running Orders — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/running-orders. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-running-orders, title = {Running Orders — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/running-orders}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }