Pulitzer Prize Goes to Gazan Who Mocked Hostages, Denied Bibas Murders

One of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners, Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, has come under fire for past social media posts in which he questioned whether Israeli hostages should be considered hostages at all, and cast doubt on the murder of the Bibas family by their Hamas captors.

The posts were first uncovered by media watchdog HonestReporting, which is now calling for the Pulitzer committee to revoke Abu Toha’s award. He was honored on Monday for a series of essays published in The New Yorker that described civilian suffering in Gaza, where he was born and raised.

HonestReporting’s investigation into Abu Toha’s online history found what it described as “virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel” content, some of which was shared with Fox News Digital. The watchdog noted that in several posts, Abu Toha appeared to disparage Israeli female hostages, question their classification as hostages, and justify their abduction.

In a post dated January 24, 2025, Abu Toha shared a photo of then-hostage Emily Damari with the caption: “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” He went on to describe her as “a soldier… close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying.”

A similar post followed on February 3, 2025, this time targeting Agam Berger. Abu Toha wrote “Israeli ‘hostage’” in quotation marks and accused the media of humanizing “killers who join the army and have family in the army.”

Furthermore, after then-IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the BBC that Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas were shown by forensic evidence to have been murdered by their captors, Abu Toha said, "shame on BBC, propaganda machine."

Hamas captivity survivor Emily Damari published a post on Instagram this morning (Thursday) in which she publicly appealed to the Pulitzer Prize committee - and responded to the winning of the prize by Palestinian writer and poet Musab Abu Toha, saying that this is the modern equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Recall that a few days ago, it was announced that Abu Toha would win the Pulitzer Prize for a series of columns he wrote for The New Yorker magazine about the war in Gaza, and that in the past he had downplayed the horrors of the October 7 massacre.

"Does it seem logical to anyone that a person like him deserves a Pulitzer Prize? Or some kind of prize in the world at all?" wrote Damari. "Members of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, my name is Emily Tehila Damari. I was a prisoner in the Gaza Strip for almost 500 days. On the seventh day of October, I was at home, in a small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Gaza, when Hamas terrorists broke in, shot me and dragged me across the border into Gaza. I was one of 251 men, women, children and the elderly who were kidnapped that day from their beds, from their homes and from a music festival."

"For almost 500 days, I lived in constant anxiety. I suffered from hunger, abuse and humiliation. I witnessed the suffering of my fellow captives, I saw hope fade. And even today, after I return home, I carry this darkness with me in my heart, my best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels. Imagine the pain and shock I experienced when I learned that you had awarded the Pulitzer Prize to Musab Abu Toha."

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