The poet is awarded the prestigious award for New Yorker’s essays on the physical and emotional massacres of Gaza during the war.
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was targeted by US pro-Israel groups for deportation, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Abu Toha received the prestigious award on Monday for an essay published in New Yorker on Gaza’s physical and emotional massacre, combining intimacy and deep reporting of memoirs to convey war experiences.
“I just won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary,” writes Abu Toha on social media. “Let’s bring hope. Let’s become a story.”
The comment appears to be a homage to his fellow Palestinian poet Refaat Alarier, who was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza in December 2023. Araria’s final poem was titled “If I don’t die, I’ll become a story.”
Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2023, then released to Egypt, before moving to the United States.
“In the past year, I have lost many of the specific parts of my memory. People and places and things I remember,” writes Abu Toha in one of his New Yorker essays.
“I struggled to make good memories. In Gaza, every house that was destroyed became a kind of album full of real people, not photographs, and the dead were pushed between the pages.”
In recent months, US right-wing groups have called for Abu Toha to be deported amid President Donald Trump’s campaign to crack down on non-citizens who are critical of Israel. The author has cancelled an event at university in recent months and cited his fears about his safety.
I just won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Let’s bring hope
Let’s go to Tale pic.twitter.com/vp6rspy6vz– Mosab Abu Toha (@mosababutoha) May 5, 2025
The Palestinian poet told The Take Podcast in Al Jazeera in December that the feeling of inability to help the people of Gaza was “devastating.”
“Imagine you, along with your parents, your siblings and their children, at school shelter in Gaza,” Abu Toha said. “You can’t protect anyone. You can’t provide them with any food, water or medicines. But now you’re in the US and a country that funds genocide. So it’s heartbreaking.”
In other Pulitzer categories, The New York Times won awards for explanatory reports, local reports, international reports and broken news photos on Monday.
The four-award-winning New York-based newspaper won the most prizes this year from Pulitzer’s 14 journalism competitions.
Named after Hungarian-American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the award winners are selected by a board of journalists and academics and presented annually at Columbia University.
The New York Times escaped the Washington Post after winning the International Report Award for coverage of the conflict in Sudan. The Washington Post was a finalist in the “Documented Israeli Atrocities” category in Gaza, including an investigation into the murder of Palestinian medical and journalists.
The post won the Breaking News Award for reporting on an attempted Trump assassination at a campaign rally last year. Reuters has received the Investigation Report Award for “Boldly Reported Revelation in the US and overseas to Produce Fentanyl.”
