He is the author of six novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000), The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003 & 2006), and A Suspended Life (2014), shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF), and Christina (2016). He has also published two collections of short stories, Everything is Normal (2004) and Still Life: Stories from Gaza Time (2013), as well as several books on politics. He is a regular contributor to a number of Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals. In 2014 Atef edited The Book of Gaza, as part of Comma Press’s “City in Short Fiction” series, which featured ten short stories by ten contemporary authors from the Strip. In November 2023 The Nation published “‘A Wall of Fire Smashed Into Me’: Dispatches From a Month in Gaza,” excerpts from his diary in Palestine.