The Palestinian who was detained by the Israeli army in Gaza in November 2023 won the prize for a series of essays in the New Yorker

Middle East Eye Staff, 6 May 2025

Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha is amongst this year’s Pulitzer Prize recipients for a series of articles he wrote for the New Yorker on Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza.

Abu Toha announced the award for commentary in a post on X on Monday evening and dedicated the honour to family members killed by Israel, as well as other Palestinian victims of its 18-month war and siege of the enclave.

“I’m honored to receive the Pulitzer Prize today. Great thanks to the prize’s jury and board members for honoring me,” he wrote.

“I dedicate this success to my family, friends, teachers, and students in Gaza. Blessings to the 31 members of my family who were killed in one air strike in 2023.”

Abu Toha has spent the majority of his life in Gaza and was in the besieged territory when Hamas and allied Palestinian fighters launched an assault on southern Israel in October 2023.

The attack and subsequent Israeli response, which left more than a thousand Israeli civilians and soldiers dead, was a precursor to the ongoing Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 52,000 people.

Abu Toha fled the area with his family in November 2023 but not before being seized by Israeli forces, taken to a prison in the Negev desert, where he was beaten and interrogated, and then taken to hospital for his injuries.

He was eventually released to Egypt with his family after pressure on the Israelis from friends in US media and cultural circles.

His essays for the New Yorker have since focused on the suffering caused by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as well as his treatment by US officials after escaping to the country.

In his essay, “Requiem for a Refugee Camp”, published by the New Yorker in December 2024, Abu Toha wrote about his fears for family members left behind in Gaza.

“I have less hope now. I do not hope that we will return to a normal life, or return to these places as they were before. The most important thing is that people I care about survive so I can see them again,” He wrote.

In March, Abu Toha said that he had cancelled his US speaking events because he “felt unsafe travelling, especially after watching students and university professors abducted on the street just in front of other people”.

‘I even don’t feel safe going out to pick up my kids from school. These threats made online against me and my family are vile’

–  Mosab Abu Toha

The Palestinian poet was speaking in light of a crackdown launched by the Trump administration to punish and deport critics of Israel who have valid US residency visas but do not have American citizenship.

“I had 16 events scheduled for the next five weeks (at Stanford, Columbia, NYU, and Cornell among other places). You cannot imagine how much I was waiting to meet you all,” he wrote on X at the time. 

“I even don’t feel safe going out to pick up my kids from school. These threats made online against me and my family are vile.” 

The New Yorker also won two more awards for its reporting and analysis of the Middle East.

Moises Saman won a feature photography Pulitzer for his coverage of the collapse of the Assad dynasty in Syria in December 2024.

The staff of the outlet’s In the Dark podcast won a Pulitzer for audio reporting for their examination of the 2005 Haditha massacre by US soldiers during the Iraq War.

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