Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha wins Pulitzer Prize for commentary

The poet gets the prestigious award for New Yorker essays ‘on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’ amid war.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has been targeted by pro-Israel groups in the United States for deportation, has won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Abu Toha received the prestigious award on Monday for essays published 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 the war.

“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha wrote on social media. “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”

The comment appears to be a tribute to his fellow Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza in December 2023. Alareer’s final poem was titled, “If I must die, let it be a tale”.

Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2023 before being released to Egypt and subsequently moving to the US.

“In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories – the people and places and things that helped me remember,” Abu Toha wrote in one of his New Yorker essays.

“I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.”

In recent months, right-wing groups in the US have called for deporting Abu Toha amid a campaign by President Donald Trump cracking down non-citizens critical of Israel. The author cancelled events at universities in recent months, citing fears for his safety.

I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale pic.twitter.com/VP6RsPY6vz

— Mosab Abu Toha (@MosabAbuToha) May 5, 2025

The Palestinian poet told Al Jazeera’s The Take podcast in December that the feeling of inability to help people in Gaza has been “devastating”.

“Imagine that you are with your parents, with your siblings and their children in a school shelter in Gaza,” Abu Toha said. “You are unable to protect anyone. You are unable to provide them with any food, with any water, with any medicine. But now you are in the United States, the country that is funding the genocide. So, it is heartbreaking.”

In other Pulitzer categories, New York Times won prizes for explanatory reporting, local reporting, international coverage and breaking news photography on Monday.

With the four awards, the New York-based newspaper received the most prizes from Pulitzer’s 14 journalism contests this year.

Winners of the award, named after the Hungarian-American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, are selected by a board of journalists and academics and announced at Columbia University annually.

The New York Times received the international reporting prize for its coverage of the conflict in Sudan, edging out The Washington Post, which was a finalist in the category for its “documented Israeli atrocities” in Gaza, including investigations into the killings of Palestinian medics and journalists.

The Post won the breaking news prize for its coverage of the Trump assassination attempt during a campaign rally last year. The Reuters news agency took the investigative reporting award for a “boldly reported expose of lax regulation in the US and abroad that makes fentanyl”.

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