Update: It turned out to be Facebook that suspended his account for a few days. In other news, Mosab Abu Toha just won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for a series of essays in the New Yorker. Original post follows:

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and writer living in the United States with his wife and three children. I have been following him on Facebook because every day he posts so eloquently about what is happening in Gaza, he shares the details of people killed and the horrors of the genocide there. Today, I discovered that his Facebook page did not exist any more, and all the posts I had shared before had that little FB memo: “This content isn’t available right now.” The latest such post was April 27th.

I can’t help but wonder and fear what has happened. Has he been Facebook banned? Has he gone into hiding? Has he been arrested? He was so bold about speaking up for his people and appealing to the larger world to stop the genocide. This post from me is a prayer for his safety, and a prayer for all that he was trying to accomplish.

I have been posting articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today I will highlight Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

I want to close with a poem by Mosab Abu Toha published a year ago in AGNI journal. Abu Toha has two books of poetry available: Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022 City Lights Publishers) and Forest of Noise (2024 Knopf).

This Is Me!

A city whose streets escaped it,
a house without windows,
a rain with no clouds,
a swimmer in the desert,
a shirt with ripped-off buttons,
a book with loose pages,
a lightless moon and colorless grass,
a toothless smile and suffocated laugh,
a dark painting on black canvas.
I’m a table with no legs,
a noisy restaurant with no guests.
I write with a pen that has no ink.
I write my name in the air
and shout it, but no voice comes out.
I look around and see many things,
but I see no one.