A sign with the poem “What A Gazan Should Do During An Israeli Air Strike,” by Mosab Abu Toha (inset) is seen at the University of California, Berkeley, pro-Palestinian student encampment, May 4, 2024. (Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images)

(JTA) — A Palestinian poet and essayist who evacuated Gaza with his family and chronicled the experience of dislocation for the New Yorker has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Mosab Abu Toha left Gaza in December 2023 — after being detained by Israeli soldiers, in an experience he chronicled in his writing — and moved in 2024 to Syracuse, New York, after receiving a visa permitting him to teach at Syracuse University.

The Pulitzer committee recognized four essays by Abu Toha: one exploring his memories of a now-destroyed landscape; one about the Jabalia refugee camp; one about the struggle to find food in Gaza; and one chronicling his experiences facing special scrutiny while traveling since arriving in the United States. It said his essays “combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”

Abu Toha’s prize comes as he has retreated from public life, saying that he canceled public appearances out of fear that the Trump administration would arrest and seek to deport him as it has other Palestinian activists in the United States.

“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Let it bring hope, Let it be a tale,” he tweeted after learning about his prize.

Abu Toha has also been targeted by the far-right pro-Israel group Betar US, which in February called him “the poster child of exactly who the Trump administration must immediately deport from America.” The group said in March after the arrest of the Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil that it expected Toha and another Palestinian, Mohsen Mahdawi, to be arrested imminently. Mahdawi was arrested weeks later.

The group tweeted on Monday, following the Pulitzer announcement, that Abu Toha was the only person among the top five it submitted to the Trump administration who had not been arrested. “Of course the liberal extreme Pulitzer Prize honors him,” the group wrote. “America 2025! Deport this jihadi now!”

Two other works related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists. The news agency Agence France-Presse was a finalist in breaking news photography for pictures captured by Palestinian photographers in Gaza.

And the play “The Ally,” which portrays tensions over Israel on a college campus, was a finalist in the drama category. The judges called the play by Itamar Moses, which was written before the Israel-Hamas war but premiered in New York City during it, “a timely drama about activism, conflicting expectations and moral responsibility on a college campus, probing American identity and the contradictions within progressive politics, using richly drawn characters with deep emotional resonance.”

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