His father came from the village of
Bayt Daras, just south of
Jaffa. In 1948, when his father was 9 years old, the Baroud family was
driven out and finished up as refugees in the Gaza Strip. His father became an autodidact with a particular passion for Russian literature. Baroud was born in 1972 and raised in the
Nuseirat refugee camp in the
Gaza Strip, where from age 6, he attended an
UNWRA Elementary School for Boys. The school was separated from
Bureiji refugee camp by an Israeli military encampment, whose soldiers frequently handcuffed and detained students for displaying pictures of the
Palestinian flag. One of his UNWRA schoolmates, Raed Muanis, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers when they sighted him running with one such small flag. As a high-school student he joined other youths in
throwing stones when the
First Intifada broke out and IDF soldiers would shoot their way. He has recounted much of his family's history, within the wider historical context of the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem since 1948, in his memoir,
My Father was a Freedom Fighter which has been highly praised by
Richard Falk and by
Gilad Atzmon who called it a "heartbreaking" "masterpiece" which narrates "a tragic journey of a rural self-sufficient population that is driven into total dispossession, humiliation and absolute poverty". His elder sister Soma Baroud, who graduated in medicine at Aleppo and whose home in the Qarara area of Khan Younis was demolished by the Israeli army in September 2024, was assassinated the following month, on October 9, 2024, when an Israeli missile struck a taxi at the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Younis, which was carrying her and some friends either to or from the hospital where she worked. Baroud is a citizen of the United States. ==Career==