Dear 2024-2025 Pulitzer Prize Board,

We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned by your decision to award a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary to Mosab Abu Toha, who has repeatedly denied the humanity of Israelis taken hostage during the attacks of October 7, 2023 on social media, justified their abduction, and disparaged calls for their release.

While Abu Toha has since deleted some of his most egregious social media posts, you will find at the bottom of this letter some screenshots. In two cases, Abu Toha insists that young Israeli women who were violently abducted on October 7, 2023, are not in fact “hostages,” but killers — simply because they served in the Israeli military, as nearly every Israeli is required to do. 

In another since-deleted post, Abu Toha ridiculed news organizations for covering the murder in captivity of Shiri Bibas and her two young children. In a not-yet-deleted post on X, Abu Toha encouraged his followers to doubt that Israeli hostages had been tortured during their captivity in Gaza. Finally, more than a year after Hamas’s false claim of an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza hospital was widely debunked, Abu Toha continues to peddle that claim.

We amplify the words of freed Israeli hostage Emily Damari, who survived 471 days in Hamas captivity, during which she suffered physical and emotional torture and starvation:

“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. Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. 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.”

Had Abu Toha dehumanized any other people — or justified a terrorist attack on any other nation — it is doubtful that the Pulitzer Prize Board would have considered him for the most esteemed prize in journalism and literature. Certainly, an Israeli author who dehumanized innocent Palestinians in Gaza would — justifiably — not be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2025 Prize for Commentary awarded to Mosab Abu Toha, and to include a more careful examination of an author’s social media posts before awarding future prizes.

Meredith Jacobs

CEO, Jewish Women International

Co-founder, I Believe Israeli Women Global Movement

Former editor-in-chief of the Washington Jewish Week

Signed:

The above signatories join 3,100 others who have so far signed onto this letter calling for change.

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