Humza Yousaf received the text on the worst possible night. His mother-in-law Elizabeth, a retired nurse from Dundee visiting family in Gaza with her Palestinian husband Maged, wrote: 'Humza, I think we are about to die. I need you to promise me that you will take care of my girls.' It arrived during the SNP conference, the eve of his first major speech as Scotland's newly elected First Minister. That collision—the intimate and the institutional, the domestic horror and the public duty—is the engine of this book, and when Yousaf trusts it, the book works. The structure follows four weeks in late October and November 2023, as Elizabeth and Maged attempt repeatedly to flee through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, each time turned away. Meanwhile Nadia's brother, working inside a Gaza hospital, sends updates about surgeries performed without anaesthetic, lit by mobile phone light, amid chronic shortages of clean water and medical supplies. Yousaf is a natural communicator and he uses these details economically—not to perform anguish, but to make the reader understand what 'stranded in Gaza' actually means at ground level. The book's structural tension is between two valid stories that don't fully coexist. The first is a family in crisis: Nadia trying to hold together while her parents navigate evacuation orders that turn out to be false alarms, her brother sends field dispatches from a collapsing health system, and her husband makes increasingly desperate calls to a Foreign Office that doesn't pick up. That story is urgent and specific. The second is a political memoir: Yousaf's rivalry with Kate Forbes, his emergence from Nicola Sturgeon's shadow, his identity as Scotland's first Muslim First Minister. That story belongs in a different book. His criticisms of the institutional actors carry real weight precisely because they're specific. James Cleverly, then Foreign Secretary, failed to return calls even after Yousaf had spoken publicly about his in-laws' situation. Rishi Sunak's government offered no meaningful updates to British citizens with family in Gaza. These aren't partisan jibes—they're documented failures of basic consular function during a crisis affecting British nationals, and Yousaf names them plainly. The dual meaning of the title earns its place. 'Under fire' describes the physical reality of Gaza's civilian population and the political and media scrutiny that came with being Scotland's first Muslim First Minister—a man leading a country that is 95% non-Muslim and overwhelmingly white, making statements about a conflict where almost every public position attracted organised attack. The book is most honest about the exhaustion of navigating both simultaneously. He chose to make his in-laws' situation public to raise awareness about Gaza's civilian casualties; the decision itself, and the calculation behind it, is handled with more nuance than the political memoir sections suggest he's capable of. The book closes with Elizabeth and Maged finally crossing into Egypt in November 2023. The relief is real, and Yousaf earns the emotional landing because he's been honest about the odds throughout. His final call for hope—'that flame of hope must be for each of us to carry'—lands better than it might in another context because it follows four weeks of specific, documented near-despair. He resigned as First Minister thirteen months after his election. That context hangs over everything, but he doesn't dwell on it here. At roughly the length of a long essay rather than a conventional memoir, Under Fire makes a virtue of its brevity in most places. It doesn't overstay. The sections it should lose—the Forbes diatribe, the Sturgeon shadow material—are clearly identifiable and excisable. What remains when you strip them is a document about what it costs to hold public office while your family is in genuine danger, told by someone who was actually in that room.
