Mosab Abu Toha was able to escape Gaza, along with his wife and three young children. The award-winning poet talks about being detained at a check-point, parenting in war, and the devastation of leaving his family and friends behind. His new book of poetry is Forest of Noise. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Thierry Gross.
It's remarkable that my guest is still alive, but you could say that about so many Palestinians who live in Gaza.
Perhaps you've read Mossab Abu Toha's personal essays in the New Yorker, which have been published under the title Letter from Gaza.
They won an Overseas press Club award.
Abu Toha was able to get out of Gaza last year on December 3.
What enabled him, his wife, and their three young children to leave is that he was a 2019 scholar at risk at Harvard's Department of comparative literature, and one of his sons was born in Boston, making him an american citizen.
The US State Department was helpful.
Abu Toha is a great poet and essayist and had writers and scholars advocating for him, too.
In Gaza five days after the October 7 attack on Israel, Abu Toha, along with his wife and their children, fled to a refugee camp after leaflets were dropped by Israelis ordering the area where they lived to be evacuated.
Two weeks later, their home was bombed, leaving it in rubble.
They had to flee again.
After the refugee camp was bombed, they stayed in a school turned into a shelter by Unwa, the UN relief and works agency for palestinian refugees.
He was able to get passports for himself and his family at a checkpoint on their way to the crossing into Egypt, he was taken out of the line by israeli soldiers who claimed he was a member of Hamas.
He was detained and beaten.