Culture & Arts
Saint Levant carries Gaza's name across four continents this autumn
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
This autumn, the biggest stage yet: Saint Levant, the Jerusalem-born, Gaza-raised singer who turned a seafront hotel's name into one of the decade's defining Palestinian albums, takes his Afandi World Tour to more than forty cities on four continents. Arab News reported that the Live Nation-produced run opens in Boston on 12 September and sweeps Brooklyn, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco before crossing the Atlantic.
The European leg begins in Dublin on 29 October, The Music Universe reported, and the arc then runs east — Türkiye Today reported a 10 December night at Istanbul's Volkswagen Arena before the tour closes in Muscat on 12 December, back in the Arab world where his story began. Tickets went on general sale on 24 July.
From a TikTok history lesson to 46 weeks on the chart#
The arc behind the itinerary is one of the great Palestinian culture stories of the decade. Born Marwan Abdelhamid in Jerusalem on 6 October 2000, raised in Gaza City until his family left for Amman in 2007, he opened a TikTok account in 2020 to talk about Palestinian history — and found there the voice that became the music, as Britannica's account of his career records.
The breakthrough came in November 2022 with "Very Few Friends", a song gliding between Arabic, French and English. NME reported it past 50 million Spotify streams within six months; Arab America put the figure near 70 million by January 2024. By March 2025, Billboard's cover story with Billboard Arabia counted 46 consecutive weeks on its Top 100 Artists chart.
The hotel that became an album#
His debut album DEIRA, released in June 2024, is named for the hotel his father built on the Gaza City seafront in 2000 — from mud, he told Middle East Eye at the title track's release with the Gaza rapper MC Abdul, because importing cement was impossible.
Al Arabiya remembered the Deira as a landmark stop for visitors, journalists and diplomats until it was destroyed in the war in late 2023.
The album keeps the hotel standing in sound. Its songs carry the family's route — Jerusalem, Gaza, Amman, California — and the title is a promise that the address outlives its building.
Coachella, with Gaza on stage#
At his Coachella debut in April 2024, programmed opposite the No Doubt reunion, he opened with a sentence that traveled further than the set, as Middle East Eye reported it:
Coachella, my name is Saint Levant and I was born in Jerusalem and raised in Gaza.
Saint Levant, Coachella, 13 April 2024
He told the crowd plainly what Gaza was living through, AFP reported, and introduced "5am in Paris" as a song about exile — a feeling, he said, Palestinians know too well. Gaza's own Sol Band joined the set virtually, Cairo 360 reported.
The performance followed the trail Palestinian artists are cutting through the world's biggest festivals — Elyanna, the first Palestinian on a Coachella stage, in 2023, and Mohammed Assaf, whose profile opened this series.
The work beside the music#
The career funds the cause alongside singing it. Proceeds from his "From Gaza, With Love" merchandise went to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, Arab America reported. With the album he launched the 2048 Foundation's grant for Palestinian artists — financial support and mentorship, as NYS Music describes it — building infrastructure for the generation behind him.
When a Huda Beauty campaign he fronted raised $210,000 for Palestinian agriculture and the war made that delivery impossible, the full sum was redirected to Médecins Sans Frontières so the money would still reach Gaza as care, The National reported. In September 2025 he played Wembley's Together for Palestine fundraiser on the bill Brian Eno assembled, CNN reported.
The distance, and the promise#
He has not seen Gaza since he was a child. "When we were 7, we went to Jordan, and I haven't returned to Gaza since," he told the Doha Film Festival last November, in remarks Daily Sabah carried — the exile the war and the closure impose on a generation of Palestinians, and the ache his music is made of.
From his home in Jordan he gave GRAMMY.com his working creed in one line: "You can't claim Palestine and not talk." This autumn, more than forty stages will hear him keep that promise — each one another room where Gaza's name, and the seafront hotel that carries it, is sung back into the world.
