KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 30 — Malaysia’s creative community can help keep Palestinian stories alive by using their platforms to talk about Palestine, collaborating with Palestinian artists, musicians and poets, and providing spaces for them to share their experiences.

Palestinian academician and poet Dr Nida Younis said such efforts could include hosting Palestinians at universities, schools, and other platforms, while encouraging Malaysian creatives to keep producing works about Palestine through poetry, novels, and other forms of art and literature.

"They must keep writing about Palestine. Novels and poetry usually live longer than media news, political stances and many things that are being erased on the ground.”

"We here in Palestine ask the whole world just to remember Palestine and to work from wherever they are to raise the Palestinian cause higher and higher, so that it towers above everything else,” she said during the recent interview on Bernama TV’s programme, Bernama World, titled "Palestine Beyond The Headlines: Global Solidarity Through Art and Music” on Thursday.

Nida said cultural institutions and heritage sites in Gaza were important in preserving Palestinians' connection to their history, memory and identity.

She said the destruction of cultural monuments, churches, museums, archives and libraries by Israel was severing Palestinians’ ties to their past, memory, heritage and narration, adding that it was a double-edged crime that erased people and their civilisation along with their past.

"This is very dangerous because they are trying to rewrite the Palestinian narration about their homeland forcibly by destroying all the cultural monuments, churches, museums, archives and libraries and everything that connects Palestinians, not only to their past, but to their future as civilisation.

"The Palestinian people have a long-lasting and everlasting connection to their history, and now everything is under the rubble. They (Zionists) are trying to erase culture, identity and everything else that belongs to the Palestinian people,” she added.

Malaysian singer Datuk Seri Siti Nurhaliza Tarudin, through Yayasan Nurjiwa, has supported humanitarian and education initiatives in Gaza, including rebuilding the Afwa Al-Aafiyah School.

The school was built prior to the outbreak of war in 2021, inspired by Malaysia’s number one singer and her husband, Datuk Seri Khalid Mohamad Jiwa, with the hope of providing educational opportunities and a better future for children in Gaza. — Bernama