Former hostage Emily Damari lights the torch during the main rehearsal of the 77th anniversary Independence Day ceremony, held at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, on April 28, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
(JTA) — An Israeli released from Hamas captivity earlier this year is objecting to the Pulitzer Prize awarded this week to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, charging that he is “the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier” because of his derisive comments about her and other hostages.
Emily Damari issued an open letter to the members of the Pulitzer Prize board on social media on Thursday, saying that she had felt “shock and pain” when she saw that Abu Toha had received the prestigious award. She wrote:
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. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities.
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.
Damari was captured from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7, 2023. She was shot twice, losing two fingers, and was held hostage for 471 days before being released during a temporary ceasefire in January. Since then, the gesture she made with her bandaged hand has become a symbol of defiance for many Israelis. Her best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are among the up to two dozen Israeli hostages thought to remain alive in Gaza.
Her post comes a day after the pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting published an expose on Abu Toha’s social media posts, showing that he had published disparaging comments about hostages. The posts it called attention to have since been removed.
Abu Toha posts on Facebook multiple times a day to chronicle Israeli strikes in Gaza, name Gazans killed there and criticize media coverage of the war. The Pulitzer committee recognized him for four essays published in the New Yorker about his experience as a Palestinian who left Gaza during the war.
Currently a visiting scholar at Syracuse University, he has said he is fearful of traveling amid a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists by the Trump administration. A pro-Israel Jewish group, Betar US, has called for Abu Toha to be deported because of his comments.
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