Who Is Mosab Abu Toha? The Poet Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Giving Voice to Gaza’s Pain
Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his essays in The New Yorker. His writing, shaped by life under siege in Gaza, documents the daily horrors faced by Palestinians through a voice that is both personal and poetic.
Though the prize is one of journalism’s highest honors, Abu Toha said he cannot celebrate while his loved ones remain trapped and starving. His win, however, marks a powerful moment of recognition for the Palestinian narrative.
Mosab Abu Toha: A Poet Shaped By War And Loss
Abu Toha was born and raised in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. His life has been marked by repeated assaults on the strip, exile, and the loss of dozens of relatives and friends.
When he was just 16, he survived an airstrike but not unscathed. In the years that followed, he turned to literature as a way to process trauma and preserve memory, becoming one of Gaza’s most prominent literary voices.
Building the Edward Said Library Amid The Rubble
In 2017, he founded the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library, to offer young people access to global literature. It quickly became a cultural lifeline for many.
That library was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in January 2024, another chapter in the ongoing erasure of culture and memory that Abu Toha documents so vividly in his work.
Detained by IDF While Fleeing Gaza With His Family in 2023
In 2023, Abu Toha attempted to flee Gaza with his wife and three children. At an Israeli checkpoint, he was abducted, separated from his family, beaten, and interrogated.
He was only released after pressure from friends and supporters abroad. “It was the most traumatizing experience of my life,” he later said. He eventually made it to the U.S., but his family’s safety and well-being remain a constant worry.
After months of war and fleeing from one place to the next with his family, Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, crossed into Egypt. He describes his experience, including being stripped, beaten and detained by Israeli soldiers. Video by Mona El-Naggar, Neil Collier and Santiago García Muñoz♬ original sound – The New York Times
The Pulitzer-Winning Essays
Abu Toha’s award-winning essays, published in The New Yorker in 2024, blend memoir and reporting to portray the physical and emotional toll of the genocide in Gaza. The four pieces honored by the Pulitzer committee are:
My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza
The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian
The Gaza We Leave Behind
Requiem for a Refugee Camp
He writes about searching for food, mourning lost homes, and longing for everyday moments like sitting at the kitchen table with his parents, or making tea for his sisters.
He recalls seeing images of the Jabalia refugee camp in ruins, a place tied to his childhood, and describes it as a graveyard that “grows and grows.”
These essays not only bear witness to violence; they preserve the humanity within it.
Abu Toha Honors Refaat Alareer And Gaza’s Fallen Writers Through His Win
After receiving the award, Abu Toha wrote: “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.” The line echoed the final words of his fellow poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza in December 2023: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”
The win, for Abu Toha, is not just personal recognition; it’s a continuation of a legacy of Palestinian storytelling rooted in truth, grief, and resistance.
Abu Toha Says He Cannot Celebrate While Gaza Starves
In response to the Pulitzer news, Mosab Abu Toha said he was grateful but heartbroken. “My sisters, my brothers, and my parents in Gaza are starving,” he said.
For him, the only real celebration will be “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, and when justice and peace are served in Palestine.”
More Than A Prize: A Refusal To Be Erased
Abu Toha’s writing reminds us that literature can do more than describe suffering; it can preserve dignity, memory, and hope. His Pulitzer is not just an honor; it’s a refusal to let Gaza be forgotten.
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