Released Israeli hostage Emily Damari has publicly rebuked the Pulitzer Prize board for choosing to bestow the coveted award for “commentary” on a virulently anti-Israel, U.S.-based Palestinian poet who has disparaged and dehumanized the Israeli captives. 

Ms. Damari, who was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023, and dragged into Gaza, where she was held for nearly 500 days, took to social media to convey her “shock and pain” at the board’s decision to award Mosab Abu Toha the top honor in the “commentary” category. 

“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,” the 29-year-old British-Israeli wrote in her reprimand. 

Considered the top prize in journalism and nonfiction writing, the Pulitzers are enormously influential. News organizations and publishers skew their coverage and devote sizable portions of their enterprise and investigative budgets to topics that could win favor from the Pulitzer Board. The board is composed largely of liberal journalists and scholars, and tends to give awards to work that focuses on race, gender, and identity topics, as well as victimhood.

Mr. Abu Toha was honored on Monday for a series of essays he wrote in the New Yorker — whose anti-Trump editor, David Remnick, is on the Pulitzer board — that documented, as the board wrote, 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,” 

(Mr. Abu Toha has observed that the conflict is not a “war”; rather, it is a “catastrophe” inflicted on Palestinians by “the Occupation” and its enablers, such as America.)

The celebrations of Mr. Abu Toha’s accomplishment barely began before the writer’s troubling comments on the Israeli hostages began to make the rounds online.  In fact, prior to his winning the Pulitzer, he was also coming under criticism, including calls for his visa to be revoked, and he had been canceling speaking engagements. It’s not clear if the Pulitzer Board vetted Mr. Abu Toha, or deferred to the New Yorker’s century-long legacy of excellence in editing and fact-checking. 

In one post on Facebook, Mr. Abu Toha criticized the media for seeking to “humanize” and garner “sympathy” for 20-year-old released hostage Agam Berger and other “killers who join the army.” In another rant, he delegitimized Ms. Damari’s status as a “hostage,” referred to her pejoratively as an IDF soldier (all young Israelis who are not ultra-Orthodox Jews do mandatory service in the IDF), and implied that her abduction was justified. 

Mr. Abu Toha has also cast doubt on Israeli forensic evidence that showed that the two Bibas children — aged nine months and 4 years — were killed by their Hamas captors with their “bare hands.” In another post, he denied that the Israeli hostages were tortured, despite numerous testimonies from freed captives — including Ms. Damari — detailing their cruel mistreatment in Gaza. The list continues. 

Ms. Damari contrasted Mr. Abu Toha’s claims with her own account of captivity. The 20-year-old British-Israeli detailed how she “lived in terror” for 471 days while she was “starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human” in Gaza. During the October 7 attack she was shot in her leg and in her hand and lost two fingers. Ms. Damari’s mother stated that Hamas “sewed” up her hand injury “like a pin cushion,” causing her to suffer severe pain through the duration of her captivity in Gaza. She was released during the cease-fire agreement with Hamas in January 2024. 

Ms. Damari closed out her impassioned message by urging the Pulitzer Board to appreciate the magnitude of its failure. “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,” she wrote. “This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.”

The Pulitzer Prize board has not yet responded to Ms. Damari’s statement. 

The board is being sued by Mr. Trump for giving an award to the New York Times and the Washington Post for reporting on the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump claims was later debunked. The Pulitzer Board reaffirmed the award after a formal review of the reporting, thus restarting the clock on the statute of limitations and allowing Mr. Trump’s suit to proceed. The Pulitzer Board has so far been unsuccessful in getting the lawsuit, filed in Texas and overseen by a conservative judge, dismissed.