Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has been targeted by pro-Israel groups in the United States for deportation, has won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Abu Toha received the prestigious award on Monday for essays published in The New Yorker “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience” of the war.
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha wrote on social media. “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”
The comment appears to be a tribute to his fellow Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza in December 2023. Alareer’s final poem was titled, “If I must die, let it be a tale”.
Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2023 before being released to Egypt and subsequently moving to the US.
“In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories – the people and places and things that helped me remember,” Abu Toha wrote in one of his New Yorker essays.
“I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.”
In recent months, right-wing groups in the US have called for deporting Abu Toha amid a campaign by President Donald Trump cracking down non-citizens critical of Israel. The author cancelled events at universities in recent months, citing fears for his safety.
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