Pro-Hamas Pulitzer winner dismissed hostages’ accounts of captivity and torture
Former Hamas hostage Emily Damari on Thursday condemned the Pulitzer board for awarding a prize to a Palestinian poet who publicly questioned her captivity and defended Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
“Imagine my shock and pain when I saw that you awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Mosab Abu Toha,” Damari, who was released this January after nearly 500 days in Hamas captivity, wrote in a post addressed to the Pulitzer board. “This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked, ‘How on earth is this girl called a hostage?'”
“He has denied the murder of the Bibas family,” Damari continued. “He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games—they are outright denials of documented atrocities.”
The Pulitzer board, which has historically favored left-wing reports in its prize selections, is facing heightened scrutiny this week after awarding this year’s commentary prize to Abu Toha for his essays in the New Yorker about the Israel-Hamas war. Abu Toha, a vocal supporter of Hamas, has openly denied Israeli hostages’ accounts of captivity and torture by the terrorist group.
“You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity,” Damari’s Thursday post reads. “And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
Hamas terrorists abducted Damari to Gaza after shooting her during the October 7 attack. Damari, who lost two fingers in the attack, said that she was “starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human” and that her best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, remain in Hamas captivity.
“Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer,” Damari told the Pulitzer board. “He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.”
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