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There is a photo of Palestinian poet from 2014 that announced his trajectory to the world as one of Gaza’s most important literary voices.

He is standing upright while surrounded by rubble inside the Islamic University of Gaza, which Israeli airstrikes had just attacked. Mosab has a stern frown as he proudly holds up a copy of Ěýas if to say to foreign onlookers: I am like you.

At the time, Mosab was 22 years old and studying English Language and Literature at university. It was during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza that he started writing poetry and felt compelled to tell the stories of his people, under siege and occupation.

“The role of a poet or an artist is to assist, or accompany people who have never been able to go to that place, to take them into the heart of the experience,” Mosab tells °®Âţµş.

Ten years after that photo was taken, Mosab speaks toĚý°®ÂţµşĚýfrom his new home in upstate New York, where he is now a Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University. In these ten years, he has lived a century-worth of lives.

"I have the responsibility to share whatever I know that is happening"

While his recognition and fame have increased globally, so hasĚý— in parallelĚý— the destruction of his home and the Palestinian people.

Since 2014, Mosab's poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Nation, and more.

He founded the Edward Said public library in Gaza City, which he filled with English-language books for Gaza’s confined yet highly educated population — the Gaza Strip reportedly has a , the US, on the other hand, has .

In 2022, he published his first poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza with City Lights, which won the and the American Book Award.

In the autumn of this year, he released his second collection, Forest of Noise, published by Knopf in North America and Harper Collins in the UK.

But these achievements have come as Mosab and his writing have been transformed by grief, loss, and anger. He hasn’t kept count, but he estimates that he and his wife have lost over 100 relatives since Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza started after 7 October last year.

“In one act, Israel killed 31 members of my extended family. My father's cousin, his wife, all his children and all his grandchildren,” he said.

Yet Mosab considers himself “lucky” because unlike other prominent voices in Gaza who call out Israeli crimes, like his friend, the writer and teacher Refaat Alareer, Mosab was not directly targeted and killed by Israeli forces.

He was, however, arbitrarily detained by them in November 2023, when he tried to evacuate Gaza with his wife and three kids (US officials told them they could leave as Mosab’s three-year-old son has a US passport).

The Palestinian poet described this as “the most traumatising experience in my life” as he was seized with 200 other civilians. They were undressed, blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, and brought to an unknown location.

“It was painful to have to sit on your knees for three days, except for when you go to the toilet once a day. I think if it wasn't for the international community, I would have stayed there for a longer time,” he said, recognising how his important status and connections accelerated his release.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear announced Mosab as an emerging literary talent from Gaza’s Al-Shati refugee camp by the Mediterranean Sea. But Forest of Noise confirms him as Palestine’s modern witness-poet.

In his own words: “I have the responsibility to share whatever I know that is happening.”

Mosab said that Forest of Noise is “the first [book] that I have published while the poems are taking place,” referring to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He wrote most of the poems only a few months ago, and the situation in Gaza has worsened since, as he explains how life in Gaza feels like “a forest that is full of noise” thus inspiring the collection’s title.

“The noise of the F16, the drones, the gunboats, the helicopters, the tanks, the shilling, the airstrikes, the screaming of death, the screaming of parents and their children, and ambulances, the fire trucks...” The list goes on and continues to haunt Mosab Abu Toha.

"I'm amplifying the voices and the stories, not only the poems themselves but the stories behind these poems"

In this collection, he merges the lyrical stream of consciousness of American poets like and Allen Ginsberg (directly referencing the two in poems “After Allen Ginsberg” and “After Walt Whitman”) with the direct and musical influence of Arabic poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmed Shawqi and Hafez Ibrahim.

Poem titles range from What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air StrikeĚýłŮ´Ç We Are Looking for PalestineĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺ Under the Rubble, narrating everyday stories from Gaza.

“To so many people, what matters is what happens after the airstrike. The number of people who were killed, the number of wounded children, the number of houses that were bombed, the number of schools. But we don't usually focus on what was happening before the airstrikes. What kind of things people were holding onto before everything was lost? So this is equally important,” Mosab tellsĚý°®Âţµş.Ěý

Poetry is Mosab’s tool to document and resist Israel’s genocide — a feat even more important as international journalists are still not allowed into the Gaza Strip and 141ĚýPalestinian journalists have so far been killed by Israeli forces.

“I'm amplifying the voices and the stories, not only the poems themselves but the stories behind these poems… It is witness poetry. We don't even have the time to fantasize about things we have never lived, because we've lived nearly everything in Gaza. We don't need to watch horror movies. We are living a horror movie, so the kind of life that we are living is itself a metaphor for the afterlife.”

Some might be tempted to label Mosab’s writing as “war poetry” and place it into the same category as First and Second World War poets who wrote in the trenches or bunkers.

But Mosab insists that what’s happening in Gaza isn’t a war, as Palestinian people have been struggling under occupation for decades, so it can’t be “war poetry.”

“I would call it poetry of catastrophe because every poem is about a catastrophe — the loss of a girl, the loss of a father, the loss of a house, the loss of a garden, the loss of the sea, the loss of the clouds in the sky that we haven't been able to enjoy as they were passing by.”

Yet he remembers the good things in Gaza too: his family, the strawberry farms, the corn fields, the beach, his students, the flowers in his garden, biking with his children, or watching football matches with friends.

With 130,000 followers , Mosab hopes that everything he shares, writes and documents will not go in vain and will be learned and re-told — like a great classical poem.

“Storytelling is not only between the reader and the writer, or the listener and the speaker, but it also goes on. The listener will become a speaker, and then he will tell the story to other peopleĚý— this is my hope," he shares.

"As a writer or as a speaker: that the listener or reader will be transmitting these stories to other people.”

Cover photo:ĚýMosab Abu Toha (c) Mohamed Mahdy

Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw

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