An excerpt from Mosab Abu Toha’s November 6 essay in The New Yorker. Toha is a renowned Palestinian author who was kidnapped by Israeli forces, just a few days ago, at a military checkpoint along with about 200 other Palestinian men.

My brother-in-law Ahmad suggests that we set out on our bikes to find my father. After only three hundred metres, we see him, his head tilted downward while he pedals.

My father tells me later that debris covered every inch of the street that led to our house. He did not feed his fifteen ducks, thirty hens, five rabbits, and six pigeons. “Maybe some are alive and stuck under the rubble,” he says. But, after he saw the bombed house and heard the frightening whirring of drones, he headed back to the camp.

When we get “home,” we all sit on the floor. It’s not until later that I start to realize: I lost not only my house and its rooms but also my new clothes and shoes and watches. My books, too.

I remember how slowly I built my personal library, and how long it took for friends to mail books to Gaza. When I came back from the U.S. in February, 2021, I stuffed a hundred and twenty books into my family’s suitcases; I had to discard some of my shoes and clothes to make space. When I came back in May, 2023, I carried an extra suitcase for about seventy books. Some were signed by friends—Katha Pollitt, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Hoffman, Ammiel Alcalay, Jonathan Dee. The airport officer thought that my passport was expired because he read it backward, from left to right. On the journey from Cairo, I sprained my shoulder while carrying my heavy suitcases.

Less than two months ago, I was in Philadelphia for a literary festival, and was planning to visit San Francisco. But I had a feeling that the situation in Gaza was precarious, and I decided to shorten my trip. Before I flew home, I asked my friend Hasan to drive down from Syracuse, so that he could give me thirty-five books that I had left with him. They included the five heavy volumes of “The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry.”

Because it is hard to believe what we have lost, I decide to return to our home in Beit Lahia and see with my eyes what has happened to it. As I approach the wrecked area of my house, I stop in a panic—not only because of the scene but also because of the sounds of drones and jet planes and bombs falling on nearby neighborhoods.

I hope to at least find a copy of my own poetry book, maybe near my neighbor’s olive tree, but there is nothing but debris. Nothing but the smell of explosions.

Now I sit in my temporary house in the Jabalia camp, waiting for a ceasefire. I feel like I am in a cage. I’m being killed every day with my people. The only two things I can do are panic and breathe. There is no hope here.