Mosab Abu Toha
The New Yorker / October 24, 2025
Since President Trump announced his plan for a ceasefire, people I know have been killed. One relative described torture during a year in Israeli custody.
Last month, my father and siblings, who have been displaced many times since October 7th, 2023, were forced to flee Israeli strikes in Gaza City. In the weeks that followed, they often asked me if a ceasefire was coming, or if more aid would reach them. Because I live in the U.S. and follow the news constantly, they looked to me for answers, for some kind of reassurance. But the truth was that I had started to lose hope. I did not want to tell them that I no longer really expected a ceasefire. I used to call them just to chat, but now I focussed on practicalities. Did they need blankets, tents, medicine? Did my nieces and nephews have enough clothes?
On the morning of September 25th, I woke up to news from Gaza. According to a Telegram post, an Israeli air strike had targeted a house in Al-Shati refugee camp where a branch of the Abu Toha family lived. I immediately feared for my extended family. I called Ashraf, my first cousin once removed. Ashraf told me that Mohammad Ayman Abu Toha, his nephew, had been killed, along with his wife and four of his children, who were ten, six, four, and two years old. They had been born in the camp, like I was, and they were killed in the camp. Only one of Mohammad’s children, twelve-year-old Anas, was still alive. He was what physicians in Gaza call WCNSF—wounded child, no surviving family.
Then, on October 3rd, President Donald Trump posted on social media that Hamas negotiators, whom Israel had attempted to kill in Qatar less than a month before, had agreed to what he called a “peace plan”. He wrote that “Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza”. The following day, Israel struck more homes in Gaza City, reportedly killing dozens, including a three-month-old baby. Ashraf messaged me to say that another cousin, Abdallah, the father of a two-year-old and a six-month-old, had been killed. “I called friends who are first responders to help get Abdallah’s body,” Ashraf told me. “Israeli quadcopter drones open fire on anyone in the area.”
Still, I began to hear cautious optimism in the voices of my loved ones. There was a sense that this time might truly be different. At 6:51 P.M. on October 8th, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan.” Israeli forces were to stop their attacks and fall back, the flow of aid was to be restored, hostages held by Hamas were to be exchanged for nearly two thousand imprisoned or jailed Palestinians, and a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian transitional committee was to take over Gaza temporarily. Those in Gaza knew that Israel could break off the ceasefire, as it had after a similar agreement in March. But soon enough there were celebrations in the streets—not of victory, because no one felt victorious, but of survival. People had lost homes, family members, and any sense of normalcy, but they were alive, and that alone was worth something.
On October 9th, I called Ashraf to check if they had been able to bury Abdallah. “Our family in Al-Shati camp tried today to go and retrieve his body,” he told me. “The Israeli drones opened fire on them.” The bodies of Mohammed’s children were also still under the rubble. A few minutes later, I was interviewed on Sky News about the possibility of a ceasefire. I discussed a recent Israeli strike on a residential building in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City. At the time of the interview, at least four people had been killed and at least seven had been injured; dozens of others were still trapped under the rubble. In news reports, the death toll eventually climbed to sixteen.
After the interview, I watched a video of a child whom the first responders had managed to rescue. Then it was time for me to pick up my own kids from school.
Yazzan, my nine-year-old son, asked me if the war had ended. He wanted to know if we could party. I paused. I knew that his mother, Maram, had already told him about a potential ceasefire on the way to school. I didn’t want to suggest that Maram hadn’t been honest. “Yes, Yazzan”, I told him. “They are just finalizing the deal. Let’s wait.”
I did not tell Yazzan that no Palestinian had helped draft the agreement. I did not tell him that families in Gaza were still being killed in Israeli strikes. I did not tell him that the plan says nothing about investigating Israel for war crimes, holding accountable those who committed them, or upholding the rights of Palestinians.
When the Israeli government announced that it had approved the first phase of the deal, Yazzan was at soccer practice. Maram and I told all three of our kids after he got home. “Woo-hoo!” Yazzan said. “Let’s celebrate!” He looked tired from a long day, but he jumped into the air with excitement. He left the room for a minute and came back toting my Bluetooth speaker.
“Can you put music on?” He wanted to hear dabke music, which is often played at Palestinian weddings and parties. By the time I connected the speaker to my phone, Yazzan and his five-year-old brother, Mostafa, were jumping on our bed. Their eight-year-old sister, Yaffa, had gone to sleep. Mostafa struck a pose in front of the mirror. He danced around, then grabbed an empty suitcase from the closet and climbed inside it. He asked Yazzan to spin the suitcase around.
Maram and I looked at each other. We were holding our phones, as always. For more than two years, we have checked the news obsessively, never knowing when the next tragedy would strike. We were guarding our own emotions, still worried about what could happen next. But, in that moment, we wanted to remain mindful and respectful of our children’s joy.
On October 12th, over lunch, Yazzan asked if I could get him a new baseball bat. “Now you should have more time to play with us,” he added. “No war in Gaza, no breaking news. So that means less time writing, right?”
That night, Maram and I stayed up late, waiting anxiously for a list of Palestinians who would be released from Israeli custody. Several of our relatives had been detained for months. Seventeen hundred names were posted in a Telegram group at 11:23 P.M.—6:23 A.M. in Gaza. To our immense relief, we saw two close relatives, whom I’ll call Khaled and Adel because I’m concerned for their safety, on the list. They had each spent nearly a year in Israeli custody. Yet many other loved ones, including Maram’s cousin Suhaib, were not included. Suhaib, a handsome young man who worked as a wedding photographer, was the only member of his immediate family to survive an October, 2024, air strike in northern Gaza. He was being transferred between hospitals when Israeli soldiers stopped the ambulance and took him.
We called our families in Gaza. Although internet access there is extremely limited, our families already knew who was being released. They had not slept that night. The detainees were being sent to Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, for medical checkups. The Red Cross would help facilitate. Crowds had gathered to welcome them—not only family, friends, and neighbours but also strangers who wanted to learn the fate of missing loved ones.
American news outlets broadcast live as hostages from Israel and beyond were reunited with their families. But, because Israel has barred international media from operating in Gaza without military supervision, journalists had a harder time capturing the moments when detained Palestinians returned. I thought back to the three harrowing days in November, 2023, when Israeli forces took me from my wife and kids and beat me. During that time, my greatest fear was that something would happen to Maram and the children. I thought of all the detainees who would discover that their families had been killed in air strikes.
When Maram and I finally spoke with Khaled, a farmer who married into my family, he was walking from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, to Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, with a younger brother. I remember picking strawberries, corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, and green beans with Khaled. I remember attending family barbecues and riding our bikes to the beach together. But none of that remains now. Not Khaled’s home, not mine. Not his farm, not my family’s garden. Not even the road to the beach. His wife has been looking after their three children in a tent.
Next, we called Adel, who married into Maram’s family. A bus had recently transported him and many other Palestinians from an Israeli prison to Gaza. He told us that, before the Red Cross had shown up, soldiers had struck him several times in the head. Now instead of celebrating his release, Adel was sobbing. He had just learned that, over the summer, Maram’s father had been killed. He had been on the way to a border crossing, hoping to come across an aid truck, when shrapnel from an Israeli air strike hit him in the head.
“I’m so sorry about your father,” Adel told Maram. “My heart is broken.”
Two days later, Khaled told me his story. His detention began in November, 2024, at a checkpoint on Salah al-Din Street. “I was forced to remove all of my clothes in front of seven Israeli soldiers,” Khaled told me. He said that the soldiers confined him in a bathroom and then interrogated him. They asked him about the hostages in Hamas custody and whether he was a member of Hamas or the militant group Islamic Jihad. When he said no, Khaled added, they beat him with the butts of their rifles. “You are lying,” he remembered a soldier saying. “I will shoot you.”
He said that at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base used as a detention camp, he was blindfolded and handcuffed for a hundred days, and twice a week soldiers subjected him to attack dogs, sound grenades, and pepper spray. He spent his days kneeling on what felt like gravel. “When I tried to sit on my butt, an Israeli soldier would kick me,” Khaled said. “We were given very little food. We had to use the toilet while still blindfolded and shackled.”
Khaled was briefly transferred to Ofer Prison, where Adnan al-Bursh, an orthopaedic surgeon who once led Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, had died in 2024, after being tortured. Then Khaled was sent back to Sde Teiman. “That was during what they called ‘the disco period,’ ” he told me. “There’s a loudspeaker blasting music at unbearable volume. You’re shackled like a dog. You wear diapers. They beat and humiliate you.” At times, he wished he could die.
I was particularly shocked by one detail. During one interrogation, Khaled was accused of being a member of Islamic Jihad, which he again denied. “I’m only a farmer,” he replied. Khaled’s greatest fear was that his wife and children, one of whom had been waiting for a surgery, would be killed in an air strike. He told me that an Israeli intelligence officer showed Khaled a photo of them. “It was a photo from our family insurance card,” Khaled told me. He had no idea how the officer had gotten it. “Detention was a hardship in itself, but the threat to my family was a torment of another kind—just as heavy, if not worse,” he said.
After four days, the questioning stopped, and Khaled understood that his file was being closed. He was not released, however. He spent about a month in a different section of Sde Teiman. Eventually, he was moved to Al-Naqab (Negev) prison, where detainees slept in tents. “Soldiers would storm our tents and fire rubber bullets at our legs and knees,” he said. “Those who were injured were left to bleed.” He said that some of their wounds became infested with maggots.
Khaled learned of the ceasefire deal from some guards. On October 10th, the guards at Al-Naqab ordered him and several others to line up. Khaled assumed he was being moved to yet another prison, until he was taken to a place called Ward A. “That’s the ward for those scheduled for release,” Khaled said. “We all started to feel hopeful.” Two hours later, they were handcuffed and taken for fingerprinting, and their hope grew stronger.
Then the guards came and took away their blankets and mattresses. “We spent the next three nights sleeping on the cold floor,” Khaled said. They were given less food than before. “Fear crept back in,” he told me. “Still, we thought maybe they were lashing out because we were being set free.” He said that an intelligence officer eventually signalled that he was getting out, telling him, “If you do anything wrong, there won’t be any warnings. We’ll send a missile your way. Got it?”
After Khaled was finally released, he walked eight miles through devastated neighbourhoods, from southern Gaza to a small town near Deir al-Balah. He was exhausted, but the closer he got to his wife and children the more excited he felt. At last, he reached a group of tents where his extended family was living. His young daughter was the first to spot him, and he lifted her into the air with joy. Then his other relatives rushed in, wrapping him in hugs.
He entered his immediate family’s tent, where his wife embraced him. He was afraid to ask where his three-year-old son was.
It turned out that the boy was only sleeping, lying on a thin blanket on the ground. Khaled knelt, called his son’s name, and leaned in for a kiss. His son stirred, half asleep, and blinked up at Khaled’s unfamiliar face. In the moments before he drifted off again, he did not seem to recognize his father.
When The New Yorker asked the Israeli military, or IDF, about the conditions that Khaled described, a spokesperson called them “baseless allegations.” The Israeli Prison Service, which operates Ofer and Al-Naqab prisons, has told the Washington Post that it maintains proper living conditions. But experiences similar to what Khaled shared—including extended kneeling, beatings, attacks by military dogs, and a lack of medical care—have been reported by human-rights groups, the United Nations, and news organizations. In June, 2024, The New York Times reported on Gazans who said they were strip-searched, blindfolded, and handcuffed and then taken to Sde Teiman, where they were held in a deafening “disco room” and subjected to physical abuse. “Any abuse of detainees, whether during their detention or during interrogation, violates the law and the directives of the IDF and as such is strictly prohibited,” the IDF said in a statement to The Times. Asked about air strikes that killed civilians, the IDF told The New Yorker, “Throughout the war, the IDF has been operating in accordance with international law to protect the security of the State of Israel and its citizens against Hamas attacks aimed at civilians, by striking military targets.”
Last week, on Facebook, a friend from my home town of Beit Lahia posted a video of our old neighbourhood. It shattered me. Not a single house remained standing. The dentist’s clinic on our street, a local clothing store, a feed mill where my father used to buy grain for our birds and rabbits, even a palm tree we used as a landmark—all of it had been levelled.
We also received a photo of Khaled and his wife in front of their tent in Deir al-Balah. The clothes that Khaled had worn in detention were hanging behind them on a makeshift clothesline. Maram and I looked at the photo with quiet joy. Then she said softly, “May Allah have mercy on you, Father.” I could see in her eyes that she was wishing her father, too, could come back to his family. We also often think about her cousin Suhaib, whom none of her relatives have been able to reach. He is one of thousands of Palestinians who still remain in Israeli prisons or military camps—many of them held without charges or trial, which human-rights organizations have called a violation of international law.
According to Gaza’s media office, since the ceasefire, Israeli forces have killed nearly a hundred Palestinians in Gaza. This past Sunday, the Israeli military alleged that Hamas had broken the ceasefire by killing two Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. Hamas said it was unaware of any clashes in the area, which was under Israeli control, and asserted its commitment to the ceasefire agreement. But, over the course of seven hours, Israeli strikes killed more than forty people. One of the victims was the eight-year-old son of a friend of mine. The child, who was staying with his mother’s family in Al-Bureij camp, was killed along with several of his cousins. When I called my friend to share my condolences, he said that his son’s body had no head and no legs. So far, the ceasefire has not felt so different from the two years that preceded it. The Israeli military spokesperson said that Israeli forces “will continue to uphold the ceasefire agreement and will respond firmly to any violation of it.”
Maram and I haven’t seen our immediate families for almost two years. Our children remember Gaza as a place of fear. Some of their school friends have been killed, but we haven’t told them yet. We had to explain that their maternal grandfather, whom I called Uncle Jaleel, had been killed. They miss their three surviving grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and their cousins. But Mostafa, our youngest, won’t even consider going back. He’s still traumatized by the nearly two months we spent in terror of air strikes.
Despite all that, when Maram and I first saw the news that the bombings would stop, she turned to me and said, “I’m going to visit our families in Gaza.” She had a bittersweet smile on her face. “You stay with the kids, O.K.?”
We both knew how unlikely that was. Gaza is beyond devastated. There is not much to return to except for our loved ones. The Rafah border crossing still hasn’t reopened, not even for the critically wounded to leave, and when Palestinians start to visit they will risk being trapped by border closures. And yet Maram wanted to be there—to stand with her family members in those first fragile moments of quiet, to celebrate our survival and mourn our dead. ♦
Mosab Abu Toha received a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for his New Yorker essays about Gaza; his books include the poetry collection Forest of Noise
