Freed Israeli Hostage Calls on Pulitzer Board to Revoke Prize to Palestinian Writer Who Justified Hamas Abductions

Ailin Vilches Arguello

---

Former hostage Emily Damari is reunited with her mother, on Jan. 19, 2025. Credit: Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit.

The Pulitzer Prize board is facing increasing pressure to rescind its decision to give the high-profile journalism award earlier this week to a Palestinian writer who justified the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, shared antisemitic comments, and dismissed the accounts of hostages held in Gaza who said they were abused in captivity.

Emily Damari, a former hostage held in Gaza for over 500 days, sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize board on Thursday urging it to rescind its latest award, expressing “shock and pain” upon learning that the prestigious honor had been given to a man who, earlier this year, questioned her captivity and denied the murder of the Bibas family.

“These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities,” Damari wrote in a post on X. “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.” 

Damari, a 28-year-old Israeli-British national, was shot and abducted from her home in Kfar Aza during Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel, during which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people. She was held in captivity for months before being released earlier this year as part of a ceasefire deal. After being shot in the hand and leg, she required surgery and ultimately lost two fingers.

On Monday, Mosab Abu Toha, a Gaza-born writer currently living in the United States, won journalism’s most prestigious honor in the “commentary” category for a series of essays in The New Yorker about life in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war. 

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha in attendance at the Busboys and Poets Peace Ball: Voices of Justice and Liberation held at the Mead Center for American Theater on Jan. 18, 2025, in Washington DC. Photo: Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

In a statement announcing this year’s awards, the Pulitzer 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.”

Damari, who was one of 251 hostages kidnapped in southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during the Oct. 7 onslaught, described the writer in different terms.

“Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer,” Damari wrote in her letter. “He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.”

She continued, “This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed.”

HonestReporting, a media watchdog group, also called for the Pulitzer Prize to be rescinded after it highlighted several posts in which Abu Toha denigrated Damari and other hostages, denied the murder of the Bibas children, and spread fake news and antisemitic remarks across social media.

“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’). This is Emily Damari, a 28 UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7,” Abu Toha wrote in a post on Facebook earlier this year.

“So this girl is called a ‘hostage’? This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage’?” he continued.

In other social media posts, Abu Toha referred to Israeli soldiers as “killers who join the army and have family in the army,” while criticizing international media for “humaniz[ing]” them.

According to HonestReporting, the Palestinian writer’s online rhetoric fits the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, spreading misinformation and perpetuating harmful antisemitic stereotypes. The organization highlighted posts in which Abu Toha referred to Israeli troops as “terror soldiers” and likened Israel’s military actions in Gaza to the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein condemned the prize awarded to Abu Toha as “shameful” and called for it to be rescinded.

“Apparently, attacking young Israeli women who were brutally kidnapped by Hamas, can get you the @PulitzerPrizes— at least when it comes to @MosabAbuToha,” he wrote in a post on X.

---

---