Palestinian Writer Mosab Abu Toha Wins Pulitzer Prize for Gaza Essays

In 2023, Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha was arrested while trying to escape the escalating conflict in Gaza. Two years later, now free and far from his homeland, he emerged as one of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners. Abu Toha was honored for a series of essays published in The New Yorker that documented the physical and emotional devastation experienced by Palestinians in Gaza, where he has spent most of his life. ‘I just won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,’ he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). ‘Let it bring hope. Let it be a fairy tale,’ he added. The Pulitzer Prize committee highlighted how his essays vividly captured the ‘physical and emotional massacre in Gaza’ by blending deep reporting with personal memoirs, conveying the Palestinian experience of a war lasting over half a century with Israel. From his arrest at an Israeli checkpoint during an attempt to flee with his family to winning the prestigious award, Abu Toha’s journey is marked by resilience and heartbreak. He poignantly writes about the struggle of his family to find food in Gaza, contrasting these memories with pre-war daily meals. ‘I long to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my parents, and make tea for my sisters. I don’t need to eat. I just want to see them again,’ he expressed. Recalling images of the destruction of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where he frequently visited his grandparents and attended school, he noted, ‘I kept looking at the pictures over and over, and an image of a growing graveyard formed in my mind.’ According to The Guardian, The New Yorker secured two additional Pulitzer Prizes: one for the podcast series ‘In the Dark’ about the killings of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and another for Moises Saman’s black-and-white photo essay on Saydnaya prison in Syria.