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option learn more at plus dot npr.org. This is fresh air. I'm Terry 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.

Abutoha was able to get out of Gaza last year

on December 3rd. 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 U.S State Department was helpful.

Abutoha is a great poet and essayist and had writers and scholars advocating for him too.

In Gaza, five days after the October 7th attack on Israel,

Abutoha, 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 UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. He was able to

...