Photo by
IDF Spokesperson/TPS-IL on 20 January, 2025
Hostage Survivor: Pulitzer Prize to Antisemitic Gaza Poet ‘Desecrates’ Memory of Victims
Jerusalem, 8 May, 2025 (TPS-IL) -- A former Israeli hostage denounced the Pulitzer Prize committee for giving an award to a Palestinian journalist who spread antisemitic content and fake news on his social media platforms and excused Hamas’ October 7 abductions.
“By awarding a prize to someone who denies the truth and degrades the memory of the murdered, you acted in direct contradiction to those values,” Emily Damari tweeted on Thursday.
Damari, a UK-Israeli national, was responding to the Pulitzer committee giving a prestigious award to Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha for his commentaries published in New Yorker magazine. Winners of the annual award were announced on Monday. HonestReporting, a media watchdog organization, uncovered Toha’s past social media posts revealing virulent antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments.
“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,” Damari tweeted.
“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.”
Damari was abducted from her apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza’s youth neighborhood and was shot in the hand. She lost two fingers as a result of her 471 days in captivity.
HonestReporting cited several of Abu Toha’s social media posts. On January 24, 2025, he posted a photo of Damari during her captivity, where he questioned, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” and dismissed her suffering by framing her as a soldier near “a city that she and her country have been occupying.”
In a February 23, 2025 Facebook post, Abu Toha mocked 21-year-old hostage Agam Berger, sarcastically referring to her as an “Israeli ‘hostage'” and accusing Israeli soldiers and their families of being “killers” whom Western media outlets like CNN and BBC “humanize.”
After IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari presented forensic evidence that Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas were murdered by their captors, Abu Toha attacked the BBC for reporting it, calling the broadcaster a “propaganda machine.” HonestReporting said Abu Toha’s posts repeatedly used antisemitic tropes, such as blaming “the Zionists” for unrelated events like the arrest of Palestinian activist Ali Abunimeh in Switzerland.
Gil Hoffman, HonestReporting’s executive director, urged the Pulitzer committee to rescind the award. “The Pulitzer Prize is the top award in journalism and should not be blemished by bestowing it to a man who repeatedly twisted facts,” he said. “Abu Toha justifies abducting civilians, spreads fake news, and calls lighting a Menorah on Hanukkah antisemitism. That doesn’t sound prizeworthy to me.”
Tweeted Damari, “This is a man who, last January, denied the very fact that I was held captive… This is not about word games — this is a blatant denial of documented crimes.”
Calling Abu Toha “the equivalent of a Holocaust denier in our era,” Damari warned the Pulitzer board, “This is not a political issue. This is a question of humanity. And today, sadly, you have failed in it.”
At least 1,180 people were killed, and 252 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on October 7. Of the 59 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.
