Emily Damari spent nearly 500 days in Hamas captivity after terrorists shot her in the hand and forcibly took her from her home on Oct. 7, 2023. Now, the Pulitzer Prize board has awarded a man who Damari calls the “modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.”
The Pulitzer board has awarded Mosab Abu Toha with a commentary prize for four pieces he published in The New Yorker discussing life in Gaza and the war’s devastation to the Palestinian people. With an active presence on social media, Abu Toha has repeatedly made his views of the war and criticism of Israel known, even going so far as to question Damari being called a hostage.
“This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity,” Damari wrote in a post on X this week. “He posted about me on Facebook and asked, ‘How on earth is this girl called a hostage?’”
The post, according to The Jewish Chronicle, from Abu Toha continued, “This is Emily Damari, a 28 UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detained 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’?”
Damari, one of 251 hostages taken captive during Hamas attack on Israel a year and a half ago, was released in January. She lost two of her fingers when she was taken hostage and says she was “starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human” during her captivity.
Even after being released and returning home, the former hostage says she carried “darkness” with her because her “best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels.”
Damari, 28, questioned the Pulitzer Prize board for claiming to “honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
In a post on his X, Abu Toha says he was born in 1992 in a refugee camp in Gaza. On Oct. 13, 2023, Abu Toha lost 31 family members in a single airstrike on Gaza City. The writer and poet says the Israeli military detained him in November 2023 but later released him after determining that he was not a threat.
“Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer,” Damari told the board in her post. “He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial. This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.”
When questioned about selecting Abu Toha for an award, the Pulitzer Prize board told The Daily Signal, that “[t]he Pulitzer Prizes for reporting, commentary, literature, and the arts are based on a review of works that have been formally submitted for consideration.”
Editor’s Note: This piece was updated after publican to include comments from the Pulitzer Prize board.
