Mosab Abu Toha’s Harrowing Detention in Gaza
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Growing up in Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha wasn’t used to seeing Israeli soldiers in person. “You are bombed from the sky. You are bombed by tanks. You do not see the people, the soldiers who are killing you and your family,” he tells David Remnick. Abu Toha is a poet educated in the United States, who has contributed to The New Yorker from Gaza since Israel launched its bombardment after the October 7th Hamas attack. As Abu Toha and his family tried to flee Gaza, he was stopped by Israeli forces, taken from his wife and kids, and wrongly accused of being a Hamas activist. He describes being stripped naked and beaten in detention. “I kept saying, ‘Someone please talk to me,’ ” Abu Toha recalls. After an interrogation, he was released, but with a more pessimistic view of the possibility for peace. “In Gaza, even a child who is six or three or four years old, is no longer a child. They are not living their childhood. They are not children. They are not learning how to speak English, how to draw; they’re just learning how to survive,” he tells Remnick. “This future cannot be built on a land that is covered with blood and bones.”
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| 1:12.6 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:22.7 | In the days following the October 7th, Hamas attack, and then Israel's bombing and ground defense |
| 1:29.0 | in Gaza, I've been in close contact with a young Palestinian poet named Mossab Abu Toa. |
| 1:35.7 | We've published a couple of essays and a poem by Mossab, and there's more to come. |
| 1:41.0 | Recently on the radio hour, he described his family's plight first leaving his |
| 1:45.4 | neighborhood in Gaza City for a nearby refugee camp I remember that two days |
| 1:52.0 | before the escalation we bought some Peter it is sitting in my fridge in |
| 1:57.9 | Betlahia I decide to return, but not to tell my wife or mother, |
| 2:04.6 | because they would tell me not to go. |
| 2:07.6 | The only people in the street are walking in the opposite direction, |
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