NEW YORK — An Israeli released from Hamas captivity earlier this year has passionately objected to the Pulitzer Prize award this week to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, charging that he is “the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier” because of his untrue comments about her and other hostages.
Emily Damari issued an open letter to the members of the Pulitzer Prize board on social media on May 8, saying that she had felt “shock and pain” when she saw that Abu Toha had received the prestigious award. She wrote:
“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.”
Damari was captured from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7, 2023. She was shot twice, losing two fingers, and was held hostage for 471 days before being released during a temporary ceasefire in January.
Since then, the gesture she made with her bandaged hand has become a symbol of defiance for many Israelis.
Her best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are among the up to two dozen Israeli hostages thought to remain alive in Gaza.
Her post came a day after Honest Reporting published an expose on Abu Toha’s social media posts, showing that he had published disparaging comments about hostages.
The posts it called attention to have since been removed.
Abu Toha posts on Facebook multiple times a day to chronicle Israeli strikes in Gaza, name Gazans killed there and criticize media coverage of the war.
A Palestinian poet and essayist who evacuated Gaza with his family and chronicled the experience of dislocation for the New Yorker won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Mosab Abu Toha left Gaza in December, 2023 — after being detained by Israeli soldiers, in an experience he chronicled in his writing — and moved in 2024 to Syracuse, NY, after receiving a visa permitting him to teach at Syracuse University.
The Pulitzer committee recognized four essays by Abu Toha: one exploring his memories of a now-destroyed landscape; one about the Jabalia refugee camp; one about the struggle to find food in Gaza; and one chronicling his experiences facing special scrutiny while traveling since arriving in the US.
It said his essays “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.”
Abu Toha has canceled some public appearances out of fear that the Trump administration would arrest and seek to deport him. He was celebrated at a conference of Jewish anti-Zionists a few days before his won the prize.
Betar US called Abu Toha “the poster child of exactly who the Trump administration must immediately deport from America.”
The group said in March after the arrest of the Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil that it expected Toha and another Palestinian, Mohsen Mahdawi, to be arrested imminently. Mahdawi was arrested weeks later.
“Of course the liberal extreme Pulitzer Prize honors him,” the group wrote. “America 2025! Deport this jihadi now!”
Two other works related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists.
The news agency Agence France-Presse was a finalist in breaking news photography for pictures captured by Palestinian photographers in Gaza.
The play, “The Ally,” which portrays tensions over Israel on a college campus, was a finalist in the drama category.
The judges called the play by Itamar Moses, which was written before the Israel-Hamas war but premiered in New York City during it, “a timely drama about activism, conflicting expectations and moral responsibility on a college campus, probing American identity and the contradictions within progressive politics, using richly drawn characters with deep emotional resonance.”
