The poet receives the prestigious award for New Yorker’s rehearsals “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza” in the midst of war.
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has been the target of deportation by pro-Israel groups in the United States, won a Pulitzer award for comment.
Abu Toha received the prestigious award on Monday by rehearsals published at The New Yorker “about the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza, which combine deep reports with the intimacy of memories to convey the Palestinian experience” of the war.
“I just won a Pulitzer award for comment,” wrote Abu Toha on social networks. “That brings hope. May it be a story.”
The comment seems to be a tribute to his Palestinian colleague Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2023. Alareer’s final poem was titled “If I have to die, let it be a tale.”
Abu Toha was arrested by the Israeli forces in Gaza in 2023 before being released to Egypt and later transferred to the US.
“Last year, I lost many tangible parts of my memories – people, places, and things that helped me remember,” Abu Toha wrote in one of his New Yorker rehearsals.
“I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, each destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled with no photos, but with real people, the dead people squeezed between their pages.”
In recent months, right -wing groups have required Abu Toha’s deportation amid President Donald Trump’s campaign to repress foreigners who criticize Israel. The author has canceled events at universities in recent months, claiming fears for his safety.
The Palestinian poet told Al Jazeera Podcast in December that the feeling of inability to help people in Gaza has been “devastating.”
“Imagine that you are with your parents, your brothers and their children in a school shelter in Gaza,” said Abu Toha. “You can’t protect anyone. You can’t provide food, water or medicine. But now you’re in the United States, the country that is financing genocide. So it’s the heart.”
In other categories of Pulitzer, The New York Times won awards by explanatory reporting, local reporting, international coverage and late-minute news photography on Monday.
With the four awards, the newspaper headquartered in New York received the largest number of awards from Pulitzer’s 14 journalism contests this year.
The prize winners, named after the Hungarian-American newspaper editor Joseph Pulitzer, are selected by a board of journalists and academics and annually announced at Columbia University.
The New York Times received the International Reporting Award for its Sudan conflict coverage, surpassing The Washington Post, which was a finalist in the category for its “documented Israeli atrocities” in Gaza, including investigations into the murders of doctors and Palestinian journalists.
The post won the last -minute news award for its coverage of Trump’s assassination attempt during a campaign rally last year. The Reuters news agency took the investigative report award for an “bold revelation of the loose regulation in the US and abroad that produces Fentanil”.
Originally published by Al Jazeera on 05/05/2025
Source: https://www.ocafezinho.com/2025/05/06/o-autor-palestino-mosab-abu-toha-ganha-o-premio-pulitzer-de-comentario/
