“Now I have less hope.
I don’t hope that we will return to a normal life, or return to these places as they were before. The most important thing is that
the people I love survive so that I can see them again.”
Thus writes the Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha, in his essay “Requiem for a Refugee Camp,” published by the New Yorker in December 2024.
Mosab Abu Toha is among the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize – Commentary section – for a series of articles he wrote for the New Yorker on the devastating Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
The Pulitzer jury praised his work as “deeply moving and urgently necessary,” his texts are described as “a combination of in-depth reporting and intimate memoirs to chronicle the Palestinian experience of the war in Gaza.” The writings published in the New Yorker focused on the suffering caused to the entire Palestinian population by the relentless Israeli bombing of Gaza, but also on his personal history and the treatment he received from U.S. officials after fleeing to the country. The writer spoke of the losses suffered, including the deaths of friends, family, and students under Israeli bombs, he described the evident physical devastation but also the emotional one perceived in Gaza.
Every day, from afar, Abu Toha continues to witness the reality of the war, also through social media, he feels the continuous and concrete need to recount the pain for what he describes as a genocide, to mourn the losses of loved ones, acquaintances, neighbors, the tens of thousands of lives that this cursed war has annihilated. Despite everything, he expresses the desire and the need to return to Gaza when it is free from occupation, to begin to hope again.
Abu Toha managed to leave Gaza with his family shortly after the outbreak of the war, in November 2023, but not before being captured by Israeli forces and taken to a prison in the Negev desert, where he was beaten, interrogated, and then taken to a hospital for the injuries he sustained. Only the pressure that friends in the media and in U.S. cultural circles had put on the Israelis to obtain his release saved his life, as he recounted in his essay “A Palestinian Poet’s Dangerous Journey Out of Gaza”: “I am allowed to put on my clothes, but not my jacket. They take my wallet and tie my hands behind my back with plastic handcuffs… I wonder how Israelis would feel if they were known by a number.”
He announced his receipt of the award in a post on X last Monday, May 5th:
“I am honored to receive the Pulitzer Prize today. I dedicate this success to my family, my friends, my teachers, and my students in Gaza.
Blessings to the 31 members of my family who were killed in an airstrike in 2023. Blessings to the souls of my four first cousins, two of whom were killed with their husbands and children. Blessings to the soul of my great-aunt, Fatima, whose ‘corpse’ remains under the rubble of her house since October 2024. Blessings to the graves of my grandparents that I will never find. Blessings to the souls of my students who were killed while searching for food or firewood. To the school where I studied and where I taught, to the library I founded and to which I added a book of poetry before 2023.
Blessings to many others, many others.
I pray for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for JUSTICE and PEACE!”
Abu Toha also dedicated the award to his colleague and friend Refaat Alareer, one of the most esteemed Palestinian poets and a literature professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, who was killed in December 2023, along with his brother, sister, and three of his children, in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. In his last poem, Alareer wrote:
“If I must die,
let it be a tale.
If I must die,
let it be told.”
Abu Toha continues every day to tell the story of Alareer and the whole of Gaza.
