By Francisca Marques and Elizabeth Wells

Mosab Abu Toha’s voice is smooth and melodic when he recites his poetry from his new home in New York. But when the Palestinian poet describes the people and the moments that inspired his writing, it turns raw with emotion.

“We are breathing on the outside, but inside, we are not,” he says.

Despite surviving physically, Abu Toha describes how the spirit to truly live has been shattered. Displaced from his homeland, where he worked as a teacher and librarian, he bears the scars of witnessing violence on an unfathomable scale.

“Our eyes are not seeing anything beautiful… We are not seeing the sunset as before. We are not seeing the sea.” For many in Gaza, as well as those who have fled, simple moments of beauty have been overshadowed by destruction and hopelessness from Israel’s war against Hamas, launched in response to the group’s October 7 attacks.

Mosab Abu Toha’s home in Beit Lahiya under rubble in October 2023. Mosab Abu Toha

Abu Toha fled Gaza with his young family late last year, after relocating several times within the enclave. Eventually he was able to make it out because one of his children was born in the United States while he was doing a master’s degree at Syracuse University and therefore has US citizenship.

The journey out of Gaza was long and painful, but amid the chaos and devastation, he kept writing. Now, he’s releasing his second poetry book, “Forest of Noise,” written in English. In part, the book is an anthology of suffering. But it’s also about survival, he tells CNN’s Becky Anderson in an interview….

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/31/style/gaza-poet-forest-of-noise-intl/index.html

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