Gazan writer and Syracuse University alum Mosab Abu Toha’s writing has earned him an Israeli Defense Forces arrest, online hatred, calls for his deportation from the United States — and now, a Pulitzer Prize.
The Pulitzer Prize Board on May 5 recognized Abu Toha with a prize in commentary for detailing in his essays his family’s perilous escape from Gaza, and the continuing suffering of the Palestinians who remain.
The specter of war has always haunted Abu Toha’s words. Threats have always hung over his pen. In Gaza, he faced Israeli strikes. In the United States, he faces hate groups who want him deported.
Abu Toha hopes this prestigious distinction will draw more readers to Palestinians’ bleak realities.
“People should understand the plight of a population who have lived in refugee camps for 77 years,” Abu Toha said. “…If people read carefully when they read my piece about the destruction of one of Gaza’s eight refugee camps, they should ask themselves, ‘Why is there still a refugee camp?’”
Central Current interviewed Abu Toha, who now lives in Syracuse, over a messaging app last week. Before, during, and after the correspondence, Abu Toha received and amplified messages from Gazans crying for help. He has also received messages from Betar Worldwide and other hate groups calling for his immediate detention and deportation by ICE.
Abu Toha was born in a refugee camp and raised in the North Gaza city Beit Lahia. At age 16, Abu Toha was wounded in an airstrike that killed six others.
His poetry and essays frequently use his own memories to illustrate the pride and pain of the Palestinian experience writ large.
Abu Toha completed Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MFA program in 2023, after which he returned to a home that would soon become rubble.
He has lost his home, his friends, his neighbors, and countless family members to Israeli strikes and bombings — several before the deadly Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s brutal ongoing military offensive in Gaza.
Roughly half — more than 1 million — of Gazans are children. There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. As of November 2024, about 90% of Gazans are internally displaced.
The IDF’s military offensive — which has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians — grinds on 19 months after the Oct. 7 attacks.
While fleeing the Israeli attacks with his family, Abu Toha was detained for days by the IDF, a galling experience he frequently reflects on. His unexplained detainment provoked international condemnation and calls for his release, which the IDF eventually heeded.
His family found refuge in Syracuse.
That knack for matter-of-fact memoir and unflinching description imbues Abu Toha’s Pulitzer-winning essays. He asks questions previously unconsidered: How can the fed ever understand the starving?; Bombed houses can be rebuilt, but how can one regain heritage and community after their destruction?; What does travel mean to people whose freedom of mobility is limited from birth?; How can a military raze a refugee camp?
In one essay, entitled “Requiem for a Refugee Camp,” he details the razing of Jabalia refugee camp in Northern Gaza — the largest refugee camp in the territory. It has housed Palestinian refugees since 1948, when the United Nations first established the camp. In December 2024, The Guardian published a timeline depicting the camp’s descent from refuge to near-oblivion.
“Palestine/Israel is not only about who is suffering more these days, but also who has been assaulting and occupying the other for decades,” Abu Toha said.
The stories Abu Toha unfurled in these winning essays are more important than the prize they earned, the poet told Central Current.
He hopes that his essays can provide readers with an expanded perspective beyond that provided by mainstream media — an unfiltered window into Gaza. At the same time, Abu Toha knows that action, not words, are necessary to stop the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza.
“An essay will not stop a genocide. A volume of poetry will not, either,” Abu Toha said. “If Anne Frank published parts of her diaries in 1942, the year she started writing them, rather than in 1947, would that have saved the innocent six million Jews in Europe? Unfortunately, no.”
The comparison to Frank, who died in a concentration camp sometime in 1945, is supported by historical evidence.
Contrary to the commonly accepted notion that Nazi Germany had hidden the Holocaust and its leadup from the international community, much of the outside world knew the essence, if not the extent, of Nazis’ campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.
Likewise, Abu Toha’s recognition comes amid desperate cries from Gazan reporters for immediate international action to break Israel’s months-long blockade of humanitarian aid, which the United Nations has condemned as an attempt to “weaponize aid.” Before this ongoing blockade, a United Nations Special Committee in November 2024 found that the IDF had used starvation as a war tactic — an explicit war crime. The UN continues to lobby Israel to allow aid into Gaza.
“There is something the world tends to ignore: our responsibility as humans is not only to punish those committing crimes against humanity, but also, and more importantly, to prevent these crimes from happening,” Abu Toha said.
When he isn’t writing essays or poetry to shine a light on Gaza, Abu Toha spends much of his time amplifying Gazan lives and deaths through rudimentary social media posts. His feeds are a gallery of carnage and unanswered cries for help; here, a picture of a skeletal child, there a picture of an elderly man exhumed from the rubble. Between them, pictures of dead newborns and toddlers.
Everywhere, suffering.
Wherever possible, Abu Toha painstakingly documents the names of the victims, where they died, and what they were doing as they were killed.
While Abu Toha’s words on war have earned the highest distinction in literature, they’ve also inspired a war on his words. For months, far-right Zionist organization Betar Worldwide has called for Abu Toha’s removal from the country, along with his family. The organization frequently calls Abu Toha a “jihadi,” among other vitriolic epithets.
“Amazing this Mosab Abu Toha is the only jihadi on our top five list to not have been deported yet. He supports hamas he was arrested by the IDF after oct 7 in Gaza and now he’s in the US every day ranting and raving against Israel and Jews,” Betar posted on May 5 in response to news of Abu Toha’s award.
“I think that those who try to demonize Palestinian voice only demonize themselves,” Abu Toha said. “Those who celebrate Palestinian voices not only celebrate the voice, in this case the writer, but also the stories they are sharing, the voices the writer carries within them.”
Betar has touted the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi and others, claiming the organization assisted in their detainments.
“How else do you expect those who dehumanize Palestinians for decades to react to a Palestinian voice when it is acknowledged?” Abu Toha asked.
The targeting of Abu Toha for his criticisms of Israel is part of a larger trend both in the US and in Gaza.
A record 232 journalists and media workers have died since the conflict began. Those include 25-year-old Fatima Hassouna, a photojournalist who dedicated her energies to documenting the conflict as it unfolded around her.
“If I die, I want a loud death,” she posted, before an Israeli airstrike killed her and 10 family members in their home.
More recently, the IDF shot to death a 12-year-old boy named Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil. al-Bardawil was not a reporter, but he was the only remaining eye witness to the IDF’s deadly attack in March on a UN humanitarian aid caravan.
On May 10, an Israeli bullet killed the 12-year-old while he was fishing with his father.
Central Current corresponded with Abu Toha on Thursday, which marked the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning ‘catastrophe.’ It refers to the 1948 Israeli forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.
Less than four hours later, Abu Toha began receiving messages of desperation from friends and family in his home city of Beit Lahia.
They told of airstrikes, of bombs dropped on houses and entire families buried under rubble. In a voice note sent to Abu Toha, a paramedic outside of the city said that the IDF had bombed the roads leading into the city, creating massive craters that blocked the paramedics’ access into the city.
“People can help us by reading more and by asking the right questions and searching for answers,” Abu Toha said, “which they would easily find if they saw Palestinians as fellow humans.”
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