Gaza-based New Yorker staffer “arrested,” editor tells staff

New Yorker editor David Remnick told staff that a Palestinian poet living in Gaza who wrote essays for the magazine had been “arrested.”

The Conde Nast-owned publication has lost contact with Mosab Abu Toha, according to Michael Luo, a New Yorker editor who announced Remnick’s note on his X social media page on Monday.

Luo’s post did not specify who the magazine believes arrested Abu Toha, only that he was taken into custody in central Gaza, the magazine said.

Israel has launched a massive ground operation in Gaza, the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory, in response to the cross-border attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7 that left 1,200 people dead.

The Post has reached out to The New Yorker and the Israeli government for comment.

Luo posted several links to stories by Abu Toa, who has also authored several books.

In 2019, he spent a year as Librarian-in-Residence at Harvard University.

According to local reports, a Palestinian freelancer working for NBC News was arrested in Israel on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization.

Earlier on Monday, it was reported that East Jerusalem resident Mirvat al-Azzeh was detained by Israeli authorities on Thursday for allegedly sharing four recent Facebook posts about Hamas’s sneaky attack on Israel on October 7.

It is unclear what the 45-year-old al-Azzeh wrote in these posts, although police described them as “incitement and glorification of terrible acts against civilians” at a hearing at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, according to the Jerusalem Post.

NBC, owned by Comcast, said Monday it had cut ties with the journalist.

“Before we recently hired Marwat Azza for services as a freelance producer, we were unaware of her personal social media activity, which formed the basis of the Israeli investigation,” an NBC spokesperson told The Post, using an alternate spelling of hers Called.

Her arrest comes at a time when other mainstream media outlets in the US have sparked outrage over their reliance on journalists who have expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the past.

The New York Times recently rehired a filmmaker who praised Hitler to cover the war between Israel and Hamas.

Soliman Hijjy — who praised the Nazi leader in a post on Facebook as recently as 2018 — boasted about a byline in the Times reporting from Gaza almost every day between October 12 and October 19.

Additional reporting by Shannon Thaler