Israel Releases Palestinian Poet of New Yorker, NYT Fame

UPDATE Nov 22, 2023 1:00 AM CST

The Israel Defense Forces says Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was released Tuesday, the day after IDF arrested him as he attempted to evacuate to southern Gaza, the Times of Israel reports. His wife and children had been allowed to continue on. The IDF says Abu Toha was among a number of civilians taken to Israel and questioned after intelligence indicated there had been "a number of interactions between several civilians and terror organizations inside the Gaza Strip." The editor of the New Yorker, where Abu Toha has published pieces, says Israeli military officials told him the poet "will be back in Gaza by the end of the day at the latest."

Nov 21, 2023 8:14 AM CST

"I'm disturbed by how other countries are evacuating their citizens from Israel and supporting Israel with arms and medical supplies, as if Palestinians' lives were of no value," Mosab Abu Toha wrote in the New York Times on Oct. 14, describing how a bomb had destroyed the building next door to his family in Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp. This month in the New Yorker, the 30-year-old Palestinian poet and author wrote of reaching his former home and finding "nothing but debris." "I feel like I am in a cage," wrote the American Book Award winner. "The only two things I can do are panic and breathe." Now, his family is desperate to know he still breathes. Told by the US embassy that he and his family would be permitted to cross into Egypt, he was arrested trying, the Guardian reports.

As one of Abu Toha's three children is a US citizen (aged 3, per the Hill), "the American embassy sent him and his family to go through the Rafah crossing," Abu Toha's brother, Hamza, wrote on Facebook, per the Guardian. But "the army took Mosab when he arrived at the checkpoint, leaving from the north to the south, as the army had ordered." Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and friend of Abu Toha, said the family was "stopped at a checkpoint with a lot of others. They were told to lift their arms to show they didn't have anything. Mosab was ordered to put his son down and then the army grabbed him, along with a lot of other men, 200, his wife said." The family hasn't heard since from Abu Toha, who returned to Gaza earlier this year after completing graduate studies at Syracuse University, per the Washington Post.

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The Israel Defense Forces have not commented. A rep for the US State Department previously said he had no information to share, per CNN. The writers association PEN International said Monday that it is "deeply concerned" about Abu Toha, founder of Gaza's English-language Edward Said Library. "We join calls demanding to know his whereabouts and the reasons for his detention," the group said in a statement. "The New Yorker joins other organizations in calling for his safe return," the outlet said in a statement in its daily newsletter, per the Hill. It also called attention to another piece of Abu Toha's writing, published Oct. 20. "One idea in particular haunts me, and I cannot push it away," Abu Toha wrote. "Will I, too, become a statistic on the news?" (More Israel-Hamas war stories.)