A former British-Israeli hostage who was held by Hamas in Gaza for 15 months spoke out against the Pulitzer Prize Board on Thursday for bestowing an award to a Palestinian poet who has disparaged victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and appeared to legitimize the abduction of hostages, among other comments that have stirred controversy.

Emily Damari, who in January was released from Hamas captivity after she was shot and taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel on Oct. 7, expressed outrage at the Pulitzer committee board over its decision to honor Mosab Abu Toha, a Gazan-born writer whose New Yorker essays on the war-torn enclave won the award for commentary on Monday.

In an anguished statement posted to social media, Damari, 28, voiced “shock and pain” that Abu Toha had won the prestigious award, citing his past remarks, uncovered earlier this week by the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting, in which he denigrated Israeli captives abducted by Hamas and questioned their status as hostages, while also casting doubt on Israeli findings that a baby and a toddler kidnapped by the terror group were “deliberately” murdered in Gaza with “bare hands.”

“If you haven’t seen any evidence, why did you publish this,” Abu Toha said in a social media post in February, criticizing a BBC report on the murder of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the young siblings who were abducted by Hamas. “Well, that’s what you are, filthy people.”

Elsewhere, Abu Toha, who is now a visiting scholar at Syracuse University, took aim directly at Damari, arguing that she could not be described as a hostage because, like most Israelis, she previously served as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. 

“How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he said in a social media post in January, when Damari was among the first of three Israeli hostages to be freed amid a ceasefire deal that has since collapsed. “This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage?’”

He likewise denounced another former Israeli hostage, Agam Berger, an IDF surveillance soldier freed in January. “These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!” Abu Toha said in a social media post in February. “These are the ones whom CNN, BBC and the likes humanize in articles and TV programs and news bulletins.”

In her social media statement addressing the Pulitzer board on Thursday, Damari called Abu Toha “the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier” and said that the committee had “joined him in the shadows of denial” by choosing to award his writing with one of the country’s top journalism prizes.

“This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity,” she wrote. “He posted about me on Facebook and asked, ‘How on earth is this girl called a hostage?’ He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games — they are outright denials of documented atrocities.”

Damari, who lost two fingers after she was shot in the left hand during the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7, also recounted the harrowing circumstances of her nearly 500 days in captivity, writing that she had “lived in terror” as she was “starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human.”

“You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity,” Damari said in her statement to the Pulitzer board. “And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered. Do you not see what this means?”

“This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it,” she concluded. 

The Pulitzer board did not respond to a request for comment from Jewish Insider on Thursday, nor did Abu Toha.