Pulitzer Hall at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. Photo courtesy of MMDA-Photos via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS

Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and author, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary on May 5. Shortly afterward, it came to light that he had made public statements denigrating the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.

Abu Toha received the Pulitzer for essays in The New Yorker “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,” the Pulitzer site said.

Abu Toha’s Extremism

Although the award committee appeared to have failed to uncover Abu Toha’s extremism, by the next day, HonestReporting, a media watchdog group, revealed he had spread virulent anti-Israel “content and fake news” on his social media platforms. All the posts are from 2025, with the most recent being from April 13.

HonestReporting shared the posts first with Fox News Digital, which reached out to Abu Toha, The New Yorker and the Pulitzer organization for comment.

Among the posts, Toha attempted to discredit Israeli hostage Emily Damari, on Jan. 25 on Facebook:

“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 on 10/7. … 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?’”

“Like Holocaust Denier”

Damari has expressed shock that the Pulitzer committee had awarded a prize to Abu Toha, “the man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity.”

Criticizing the committee, she posted to Facebook, “You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy and human dignity, and yet you chose to elevate a voice that denies the truth, erases the victims and desecrates the memory of the murdered. Don’t you see what that means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a brave writer. He is the modern equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And in honoring him, you joined him in the shadow of denial. This is not a political issue. This is a matter of humanity. And today, you failed.”

Abu Toha similarly maligned 20-year-old Agam Berger, an IDF observer who was kidnapped from the Nahal Oz post on the Gaza border and spent 482 days in captivity, decrying how the media had humanized her in a Feb. 3 Facebook post:

“The Israeli ‘hostage’ Agam Berger, who was released days ago participates in her sister’s graduation from an Israeli Air Force officers’ course.

“These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!

Propaganda?

“These are the ones whom CNN, BBC and the likes humanize in articles and TV programs and news bulletins.”

Abu Toha also attacked the BBC, along with then-IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, as a “propaganda machine” for reporting that the Bibas children had been killed by Hamas terrorists with their bare hands. “If you haven’t seen any evidence, why did you publish this. Well, that’s what you are, filthy people,” he wrote on Feb. 22.

Nir Oz resident Shiri Bibas, 33, and her two children, Ariel, 5, and Kfir, 2, were murdered in Hamas captivity.

Abu Toha also accused the Israeli soldiers and Israel’s government of random killing. On Jan. 10, he chastised The New York Times for the headline: “Israeli soldiers on vacation are being investigated for war crimes in Gaza.”

He posted in response, “’On vacation’? You mean ‘on break from killing,’ right? Come on, NTY.”

Hamas Apologist

On Feb. 20, he posted, “Netanyahu paid a visit to the Tulkarem refugee camp today. He and his soldiers occupied a Palestinian home and they were planning to kill more children and their families.”

HonestReporting also found that Abu Toha had violated the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, blaming “the Zionists” when Swiss police arrested Ali Abunimeh, co-founder of Electronic Intifada. He also accused Israel of genocide.

Abu Toha, who is a visiting fellow at Syracuse University’s English Department, told NPR on Oct. 15, 2024, that the media should “stop talking about Hamas” because “Hamas is not the cause of the problem.”

Politically Driven Pulitzers

The Pulitzers, which are awarded by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board (Claire Shipman, president of Columbia, sits on the board), have faced criticism for years from conservatives, who accuse it of politically driven selections.

In 2023, Mark Hemingway of The Federalist, in an article titled “For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation,” wrote, “This many high-profile failures in such a short time makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.”

He quoted Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who served on the nominating committee, describing its inner workings:

“The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year.”