Gazan poet who denied Israeli captives are hostages wins Pulitzer Prize

Abu Toha “specifically disparaged female Israeli hostages, questioned their hostage status, and implicitly justified their abduction,” says HonestReporting.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a Gazan poet who denied Israelis kidnapped by Hamas are hostages and called into question the murder of hostage Shiri Bibas and her children.

Mosab Abu Toha was given the prestigious award in the “commentary” category for a series of essays he wrote for the New Yorker about his experiences living in Gaza during the war.

The Pulitzer committee lauded the 32-year-old for “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.”

Abu Toha’s essays focused on war-torn Gaza, saying dozens of family members had been killed by airstrikes.

He was detained in November 2023 and held briefly.

HonestReporting noted that Abu Toha has a history of antisemitism expressed in social media posts and has gone so far as to deny that Israeli captives are hostages, especially if they have served in the IDF.

HonestReporting has called for Abu Toha’s award to be rescinded for raising doubt on the murder of Shiri Bibas and her two young children, Kfir and Ariel, all of whom were kidnapped during Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7.

The media watchdog reported that Abu Toha “specifically disparaged female Israeli hostages, questioned their hostage status, and implicitly justified their abduction.”

On January 25, 2024, Abu Toha posted a photo of freed hostage Emily Damari with the caption, “How on earth is this girl 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?'” Abu Toha wrote of Damari, who lost two fingers to Hamas gunfire and was released after 471 days in captivity.

On February 3, 2025, Abu Toha wrote disparagingly of released captive and IDF lookout Agam Berger and cast doubt on whether she could be considered a hostage, given her IDF service.

“These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army! These are the ones who CNN, BBC, and the likes humanize in articles, TV programs, and news bulletins,” he wrote.

When IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari told the BBC that Shir and her children were murdered, Abu Toha wrote, “Shame on BBC, propaganda machine.”