Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who this week won the Pulitzer Prize in the commentary category for a series of articles for The New Yorker about life in Gaza in the shadow of the war, has justified the kidnapping of Israelis on October 7 and spread antisemitic content and fake news on his social media accounts, the watchdog HonestReporting has exposed.
Toha, who said that Emily Damari and the other female lookouts held in Gaza for over a year can not be considered hostages because they are soldiers, 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.
Israeli forensic analysis found that the Bibas boys were killed by the terrorists using their “bare hands.”
Toha has also cast doubt on the released hostages' claims that they were tortured while in captivity.
"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, and included 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.
HonestReporting reviewed Toha's social media platforms, and revealed his virulent antisemitism and his spreading of Hamas propaganda.
Toha amplified claims that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 17, 2023, and was blamed by Hamas of killing some 500 Palestinians in the attack. Despite initial reports blaming Israel for the bombing, which were picked up by much of the mainstream media, authorities soon acknowledged that a misfired Hamas rocket struck the hospital's parking lot.
"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.
HonestReporting called on the Pulitzer Prize 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, 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.
In a post on the X platform after his prize was announced, Toha 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." He concluded the post with: "I’m praying for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and JUSTICE and PEACE!"
Among the poet's winning essays are "The Gaza We Leave Behind," published on the site on October 7, 2024, a year after the massacre, and describing his longing for his homeland, and "Requiem for a Refugee Camp," which deals with the destruction of the Jabaliya refugee camp, where his grandparents were born and raised. In it, he recalled his days in Jabaliya in early November 2023: "I saw two men carrying a headless body. ... Then I came to a view of hell—an area of at least twenty-seven thousand square feet, flattened and ablaze. I had never witnessed such devastation in my life. When I returned to my family, I told them, 'There cannot be more destruction like this.' I could not imagine anything worse."
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His most recent essay, “Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians,” was published in February, and was written during the ceasefire, when residents of the Gaza Strip began to return to their homes, and in response to US President Donald Trump’s proposal to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Toha, a poet, writer and essayist, was born in 1992 in the Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As an adult, he founded a public English-language library in Gaza named after Edward Said. In 2022, he published a poetry collection titled "Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear," which explores his life in Gaza and received critical acclaim.
Since 2019, Toha has spent time in the United States as a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University and Syracuse University. At the start of the war, he fled his home in northern Gaza to the Jabaliya refugee camp. He later attempted to leave for the U.S. via Egypt with his wife and three children. According to reports, he was detained in Rafah in November 2023 alongside other Gazans but was released a few days later. He currently lives in New York.