Mick Hartley

Yesterday we heard about the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Esquire for their “extraordinary, deeply moving account” of the “beloved” cross-dressing Alabama mayor. Now it's Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha who wins a Pulitzer for his Gaza war essays:

The Pulitzer committee announced on Monday that Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet from Gaza, had won the award in the “commentary” category for essays published in The New Yorker magazine….

The committee praised Abu Toha, 32, for his “essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”

A response:

Dear Members of the @PulitzerPrizes board,

My name is Emily Damari. I was held hostage in Gaza for over 500 days.

On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border…

— Emily Damari (@EmilyDamari1) May 8, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Full text:

On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border into Gaza. I was one of 251 men, women, children, and elderly people kidnapped that day from their beds, their homes, and a music festival.

For almost 500 days I lived in terror. I was starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human. I watched friends suffer. I watched hope dim. And even now, after returning home, I carry that darkness with me – because my best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels.

So imagine my shock and pain when I saw that you awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Mosab Abu Toha.

This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities.

You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.

Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.

This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.

From Jewish News:

A Palestinian writer, recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize, has sparked outrage for repeatedly describing former Israeli hostages as “killers” and pushing disproven Hamas claims about the 7 October attacks.

Mosab Abu Toha, honoured for his New Yorker essays on Gaza, used social media throughout 2025 to mock, vilify and question the suffering of those abducted by Hamas.

In several posts uncovered by watchdog Honest Reporting, the poet denied torture, labelled female hostages “killers”, and described forensic reports of murdered children as “propaganda”.