New Pulitzer Prize winner disparaged Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on Oct 7, questioned their 'hostage' status
FIRST ON FOX - The Pulitzer board awarded a prize Monday to a Palestinian poet and author who frequently disparaged Israeli hostages on social media, referring to them as "killers" and denying they were tortured under Hamas captivity.
Mosab Abu Toha was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his essays published in the New Yorker which detailed the ongoing war in Gaza. Social media posts of his, uncovered by the journalism watchdog group Honest Reporting and shared exclusively with Fox News Digital, show a frequent pattern of hostility towards the Israeli hostages, particularly the women. All posts are from 2025, with the most recent April 13.
"How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most 'hostages'). This is Emily Damari, a 28 UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed on 10/7… So this girl is called a 'hostage?' This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a 'hostage?'" Toha posted about Israeli hostage Emily Damari on January 24, 2025.
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Damari, 29, was shot in the hand during the barbaric Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist invasion of Israel and subsequently lost two fingers. She was dragged from her home by terrorists and held in captivity in Gaza for 471 days. She said she suffered immense pain for a year and a half from an open-festering wound that resulted from shoddy medical work done by Hamas, who her mother said "sewed her up like a pin cushion."
"The Israeli 'hostage' Agam Berger, who was released days ago participates in her sister's graduation from an Israeli Air Force officers' course. These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army! These are the ones whom CNN, BBC and the likes humanize in articles and TV programs and news bulletins," Toha posted on Feb. 3, 2025.
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Berger, 28, is an Israeli violinist and former Gaza border scout at base Nahal Oz who was held captive in Gaza for 482 days. The young woman detailed how her captors tried to force her to convert her to Islam and how she and a fellow scout, Liri Albag, were kept in a "small room with no natural light."
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Toha has also cast doubt on the forensic evidence that showed that the Bibas children, 9-month-old Kfir and Ariel, 4, were killed by their captors.
"Shame on BBC, propaganda machine. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said 'forensic findings', which have not been seen by the BBC, suggested the boys had been killed with 'bare hands.' If you haven't seen any evidence, why did you publish this. Well, that's what you are, filthy people," Toha posted February 21, 2025.
An Israeli forensic analysis found that the two small boys were killed by the murderers' "bare hands." Heart-wrenching footage from Oct. 7 showed Shiri Bibas and her two boys being kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. The bodies of the two boys were returned in February, Hamas had initially returned a different body and claimed that it was Shiri Bibas before surrendering her remains after international outcry.
The poet has also cast doubt on Israeli hostages' claims that they were tortured, despite multiple testimonies from freed captives alleging horrific treatment.
"When the Israeli hostages were released, did you see any torture signs? Even the soldiers among them?" Toha posted on X on February 1, 2025, over a video of a freed Palestinian prisoner who appeared to have severe blisters on both of his legs, whom Toha alleged was "kidnapped" after Oct. 7.
Freed hostage Eli Sharabbi revealed that Hamas terrorists kept him in chains so tight they ripped his skin, beat him and broke his ribs and practically starved him. He said when he was finally released he said he weighed just "44 kilos" (97 pounds) and had lost half his body weight, in a speech delivered to the UN.
An Israeli health ministry report found that teenage captives were forced to perform sexual acts on each other.
President Trump said that Sharabbi and other freed hostages looked like "Holocaust survivors" during a press scrum on Air Force One Feb. 9.
"They were in horrible condition—emaciated. It looked like something from many years ago," Trump said.
Toha also seemed to mouth Hamas propaganda, accusing Israel of having bombed Al-Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 17, 2023. In the initial hours after the blast, mainstream media outlets parroted claims made by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry that Israel bombed the hospital, killing as many as 500 people.
But international authorities quickly concluded that it was the hospital's parking lot that was hit by a Palestinian terrorist group's missile that misfired, resulting in a death toll a fraction of what Hamas had first alleged.
"Remember when Israel denied its responsibility for the bombing of the Ahli/Baptist Hospital in 10/2023? Today Israel bombed a building and a power plant minutes after it threatened to bomb. Another piece of breaking news: Israel warned that it would carry out another air strike," Toha posted on April 13, 2025.
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"The Pulitzer Prize is the top award in journalism and should not be blemished by bestowing it to a man who repeatedly twisted facts, Abu Toha justifies abducting civilians from their homes, and spreads fake news. That doesn't sound prize-worthy to me," Honest Reporting Executive Director Gil Hoffman told Fox News Digital.
"To state the obvious these posts are an absolute disgrace and this man should be condemned for his comments, not given a Pulitzer Prize. Reading these posts should make any decent person absolutely sick to their stomach," Israeli Consul General in New York Ambassador Ofir Akunis told Fox News Digital.
The Pulitzer committee wrote that they awarded Toha the coveted prize for his "essays on 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."
Toha had written that he was detained by Israeli forces while trying to flee Gaza with his family in 2023. He claimed he was beaten and interrogated by IDF troops as he attempted to make his way to Egypt.
The Pulitzer Prize org, New Yorker and Toha did not respond to a request for comment.
Original article source: New Pulitzer Prize winner disparaged Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on Oct 7, questioned their 'hostage' status
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