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Freed Israeli Hostage Calls on Pulitzer Board to Revoke Prize to Palestinian Writer Who Justified Hamas Abductions
Former hostage Emily Damari is reunited with her mother, on Jan. 19, 2025. Credit: Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit.
The Pulitzer Prize board is facing increasing pressure to rescind its decision to give the high-profile journalism award earlier this week to a Palestinian writer who justified the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, shared antisemitic comments, and dismissed the accounts of hostages held in Gaza who said they were abused in captivity.
Emily Damari, a former hostage held in Gaza for over 500 days, sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize board on Thursday urging it to rescind its latest award, expressing “shock and pain” upon learning that the prestigious honor had been given to a man who, earlier this year, questioned her captivity and denied the murder of the Bibas family.
“These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities,” Damari wrote in a post on X. “You claim 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.”
Dear Members of the @PulitzerPrizes board,
My name is Emily Damari. I was held hostage in Gaza for over 500 days.
On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border…
— Emily Damari (@EmilyDamari1) May 8, 2025
Damari, a 28-year-old Israeli-British national, was shot and abducted from her home in Kfar Aza during Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel, during which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people. She was held in captivity for months before being released earlier this year as part of a ceasefire deal. After being shot in the hand and leg, she required surgery and ultimately lost two fingers.
On Monday, Mosab Abu Toha, a Gaza-born writer currently living in the United States, won journalism’s most prestigious honor in the “commentary” category for a series of essays in The New Yorker about life in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.
In a statement announcing this year’s awards, the Pulitzer committee praised Abu Toha, 32, 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.”
Damari, who was one of 251 hostages kidnapped in southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during the Oct. 7 onslaught, described the writer in different terms.
“Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer,” Damari wrote in her letter. “He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.”
She continued, “This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed.”
HonestReporting, a media watchdog group, also called for the Pulitzer Prize to be rescinded after it highlighted several posts in which Abu Toha denigrated Damari and other hostages, denied the murder of the Bibas children, and spread fake news and antisemitic remarks across social media.
“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 [sic] on 10/7,” Abu Toha wrote in a post on Facebook earlier this year.
“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’?” he continued.
In other social media posts, Abu Toha referred to Israeli soldiers as “killers who join the army and have family in the army,” while criticizing international media for “humaniz[ing]” them.
According to HonestReporting, the Palestinian writer’s online rhetoric fits the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, spreading misinformation and perpetuating harmful antisemitic stereotypes. The organization highlighted posts in which Abu Toha referred to Israeli troops as “terror soldiers” and likened Israel’s military actions in Gaza to the Holocaust.
On Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein condemned the prize awarded to Abu Toha as “shameful” and called for it to be rescinded.
“Apparently, attacking young Israeli women who were brutally kidnapped by Hamas, can get you the @PulitzerPrizes— at least when it comes to @MosabAbuToha,” he wrote in a post on X.
Apparently, attacking young Israeli women who were brutally kidnapped by Hamas, can get you the @PulitzerPrizes — at least when it comes to @MosabAbuToha.
Shameful. pic.twitter.com/o0e1kvO93B— Oren Marmorstein (@OrenMarmorstein) May 7, 2025
The post Freed Israeli Hostage Calls on Pulitzer Board to Revoke Prize to Palestinian Writer Who Justified Hamas Abductions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Readies for a Nationwide Strike on Sunday
Demonstrators hold signs and pictures of hostages, as relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas protest demanding the release of all hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itai Ron
i24 News – The families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza are calling on for a general strike to be held on Sunday in an effort to compel the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a deal with Hamas for the release of their loved ones and a ceasefire. According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, of whom 20 are believed to be alive.
The October 7 Council and other groups representing bereaved families of hostages and soldiers who fell since the start of the war declared they were “shutting down the country to save the soldiers and the hostages.”
While many businesses said they would join the strike, Israel’s largest labor federation, the Histadrut, has declined to participate.
Some of the country’s top educational institutions, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, declared their support for the strike.
“We, the members of the university’s leadership, deans, and department heads, hereby announce that on Sunday, each and every one of us will participate in a personal strike as a profound expression of solidarity with the hostage families,” the Hebrew University’s deal wrote to students.
The day will begin at 6:29 AM, to commemorate the start of the October 7 attack, with the first installation at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. Further demonstrations are planned at dozens of traffic intersections.
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Netanyahu ‘Has Become a Problem,’Says Danish PM as She Calls for Russia-Style Sanctions Against Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become a “problem,” his Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen said Saturday, adding she would try to put pressure on Israel over the Gaza war.
“Netanyahu is now a problem in himself,” Frederiksen told Danish media, adding that the Israeli government is going “too far” and lashing out at the “absolutely appalling and catastrophic” humanitarian situation in Gaza and announced new homes in the West Bank.
“We are one of the countries that wants to increase pressure on Israel, but we have not yet obtained the support of EU members,” she said, specifying she referred to “political pressure, sanctions, whether against settlers, ministers, or even Israel as a whole.”
“We are not ruling anything out in advance. Just as with Russia, we are designing the sanctions to target where we believe they will have the greatest effect.”
The devastating war in Gaza began almost two years ago, with an incursion into Israel of thousands of Palestinian armed jihadists, who perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
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As Alaska Summit Ends With No Apparent Progress, Zelensky to Meet Trump on Monday
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks at the press conference after the opening session of Crimea Platform conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, 23 August 2023. The Crimea Platform – is an international consultation and coordination format initiated by Ukraine. OLEG PETRASYUK/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – After US President Donald Trump hailed the “great progress” made during a meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he was set to meet Trump on Monday at the White House.
“There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven’t quite gotten there, but we’ve made some headway,” Trump told reporters during a joint press conference after the meeting.
Many observers noted, however, that the subsequent press conference was a relatively muted affair compared to the pomp and circumstance of the red carpet welcome, and the summit produced no tangible progress.
Trump and Putin spoke briefly, with neither taking questions, and offered general statements about an “understanding” and “progress.”
Putin, who spoke first, agreed with Trump’s long-repeated assertion that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine in 2022 had Trump been president instead of Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump said “many points were agreed to” and that “just a very few” issues were left to resolve, offering no specifics and making no reference to the ceasefire he’s been seeking.