‘In Gaza, Death Is Safer Than Life’: Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Recalls His Struggle To Survive

What is home?
It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes.
It is the café where I watched football matches and played.
My child stops me: can a four-letter word hold all of these?

—Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

Poetry is that outlet through which one emotes their thoughts, feelings and experiences. In war, poetry becomes the evidence, and poets, the collectors of it. In Gaza, poetry has become the embodiment of genocide. In a four-storey house, the third floor used to be occupied by a poet. His name is Mosab Abu Toha. He had a writer’s desk and a wall full of books. He had built Gaza’s first English library there. He used to spend hours there, reading and writing.

Now all that remains of Abu Toha’s house is rubble, a few torn pages and memories of the touch. “I just don’t see my books, the ones I brought with me each time I returned from the US. I do not see my writing desk, not my children’s beds. Not my and my wife’s beautiful clothes and shoes,” Toha said, as he shared a photo of the rubble on his social media account on October 29.

Toha received the news of his fallen house a day late when the internet came back. He had already escaped with his family to another location when the airstrikes hit the building. In the days leading to it, there was heavy bombardment, tanks shelling all around him. Children were screaming and it was dark except for the light of the explosions.

The Israeli military had, on October 12, ordered people in northern Gaza to evacuate and move to the south. This required the evacuation of 1.1 million people at once. The UN had already deemed it impossible. But the Israeli troops were relentless. Abu Toha, who had already lost a few friends by then, now started witnessing it closer to home. The bombings came too close to his family; the shivers and the nightmares became too frequent. “Now that the night has come, we don’t know where the bombing is. We see the flash of explosions. We smell the gunpowder and burnt concrete. We hear our tears as they shiver in our eyes,” he wrote on October 26.

The same day, Toha shared the last email he received from the US Department of State to facilitate their escape from Gaza through the Rafah border and Egypt. “I’m so relieved,” he said, “They still remember that there are American citizens in Gaza, like my youngest son, Mostafa, who is three years and a half and is living a life of horror with us.”

Mostafa, his youngest, is witnessing the third war in his three and a half years on this earth. “He is living, and hopefully surviving.” Mostafa was born in Mount Auburn Hospital in Boston before moving to live in Syracuse for a few months, where Mosab studied for his MFA in Creative Writing. “I’m proud to be Orange (Palestinian), but Israel, and with the American Administration supporting it in all ways thinkable, has turned our night sky into an orange hell,” Toha said.

Toha and his family, promised by the US Department that they would be taken care, kept moving from one area to another, thinking one was safer than the other. But the bombings followed them everywhere. “The bombing in Jabalia Camp was just 70 metres away from us. A whole neighborhood was wiped out. I tried to help but the massacre was big. I need help,” he wrote on November 1. As Toha and his family tried to escape from Gaza, he was stopped by Israeli forces at a checkpoint. He was taken away from his wife and kids, and wrongly accused of being a Hamas activist. He spoke to media persons and described on his social media posts how he was stripped naked and beaten in detention.

As the bombings went on, Abu Toha’s view on the possibility of peace became more and more pessimistic. “In Gaza, Death is safer than Life,” he wrote. If death now seems like a privilege in Gaza, what about the dreams people had to learn, to grow, to travel, to become something? To live?

Even as nights become colder in Palestine and pessimism grows on the people, there is a glimmer of hope that comes and goes in moments of resilience. On one such moment, Abu Toha wrote, “When this war ends, I hope my dreams can be my reality—The dream of seeing Gaza from sky on plane, of riding my bike with kids without stopping at the border, of diving deep in the sea without being fired at by a gunboat, the dream that this land can be safe to grow more dreams.”

(This appeared in the print as 'In Gaza, Death Is Safer Than Life')