Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha has been awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his poignant and deeply personal essays in The New Yorker, documenting life and loss in Gaza. His win marks a historic moment not only for Palestinian literature but for global journalism that centers voices from within conflict zones.
Abu Toha, 32, has spent nearly his entire life in Gaza. His Pulitzer-winning work combines intimate memoir with meticulous reporting, capturing the raw physical and emotional toll of the war between Israel and Hamas that has ravaged the territory for over a year and a half.
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha announced on X, formerly Twitter. “Let it bring hope / Let it be a tale.”
The Pulitzer board praised the essays for their profound insight, noting that they “portray the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience.”
One of Abu Toha’s most harrowing essays recounts his own arrest in 2023 by Israeli forces. He was detained at a checkpoint while attempting to flee northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia with his wife, Maram, and their three children. “They separated me from my family, beat me, and interrogated me,” he wrote. His release and eventual escape to the United States came only after a wave of international pressure from friends and advocates.
In another essay, Abu Toha describes his family’s desperate search for food amid the siege, contrasting it with memories of simple, joyful meals shared before the war. “I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters,” he wrote. “I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.”
Mosab Abu Toha’s reflection
He also reflected on the devastation of Jabalia refugee camp, once home to his grandparents and the school he attended. “I looked at the photos again and again, and an image of a graveyard that grows and grows formed in my mind,” he wrote.
Outside of Gaza, Abu Toha’s experience with suspicion and discrimination continued. During a layover in Boston, he recounted an unsettling interaction with a TSA agent who swabbed his hands for explosives. “I was kidnapped by the Israeli army in November… Today, you come and separate me from my wife and kids, just like the army did a few months ago.”
Abu Toha’s Pulitzer was one of several awarded to The New Yorker this year. The magazine also won for an investigative podcast exposing the U.S. military’s killing of Iraqi civilians, and for Moises Saman’s feature photography capturing the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria.
The Pulitzer Prizes in the arts also recognized novelist Percival Everett for James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved character. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins received the drama award for Purpose, a searing depiction of a Black family consumed by internal conflict.
In a year defined by war, displacement, and reckoning, Mosab Abu Toha’s writing stands as a testament to the power of literature to bear witness and bring truth to the forefront.
