Six months before his assassination in Tehran, Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh explained the goals of the Oct. 7 attack in a dramatically clear manner.
Speaking to the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Doha, he provided the usual false accusations about Israel plotting to harm the Aqsa Mosque. He complained about Arab and Muslim countries that had been ready to normalize relations with Israel.
But he also justified the attack, which killed more Jews than any since the Holocaust, by saying that until Oct. 7, the Palestinian cause was being marginalized around the world.
“The international community, global decision-making circles no longer invoke the Palestinian cause,” he said. According to a clip from the speech provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, he called for not just a “jihad of the swords” and a “financial jihad” but also “verbal jihad, which is jihad by the tongue,” to liberate Jerusalem.
To that end, Hamas cultivated ties with a group of Gazans who contributed photographs, and often words, to the world’s top media outlets. Hamas trained young journalists and gave them prizes for loyalty.
But only those who were most trusted were given unfettered access to the biggest news that Hamas wanted the world to see. One of those events was the release of the coffins of the Bibas family on February 20, 2025.
There were small coffins for redheaded children Ariel and Kfir, who were four years old and nine months old, respectively, when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. And there was a larger coffin for their mother, Shiri, which contained the body of a random Gazan woman and caused massive anguish among Israelis and people around the world who cared about the family and wanted its misery to finally end.
One of the freelancers carefully selected by Hamas to photograph the coffins up close was Saher Alghorra, a contributor to The New York Times, who had proven his ability to deliver the terrorist organization’s narrative to the world in the most respected international media outlet.
The pictures Alghorra sent the Times depicted masked Hamas pallbearers carrying Shiri’s coffin, which was adorned with a sign featuring two pictures: one of her, and one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Near Netanyahu’s face, the words “the murderer” were written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Near Shiri’s were the words “arrest date 7/10/23.”
The photographs were pure propaganda. So were other pictures Alghorra took that made it look like Israel was purposely targeting civilians and starving Gazans, including small children.
When journalism becomes propaganda
He also photographed convicted Palestinian murderers arriving at Nasser Hospital in Gaza in October 2025 after being released from Israeli prisons. In his caption, Alghorra labeled them “prisoners,” the same word he used to describe Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, as well as Oded Lifschitz, an 83-year-old peace activist released at the same time after he was kidnapped from his home and murdered in captivity.
For those propaganda pictures, the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced on Monday that Alghorra would receive this year’s prize for breaking news photography.
Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller said Alghorra was being given the prize for “his haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.”
Miller neglected to mention that Alghorra had justified the Oct. 7 attacks, referring that day to “the Palestinian resistance in Gaza firing thousands of missiles toward the occupied territories in response to settlers’ attacks and incursions into Al Aqsa Mosque” in a caption highlighted by the media watchdog HonestReporting.
As executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting, I initiated a campaign two years ago to discourage the Pulitzer Prize from being given to Gazan photographers who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7. The photos in Reuters’ winning bid that year did not include pictures from that day, in part because we called into question the physical and ethical boundaries crossed to obtain them.
Last year, we brought to the world’s attention the audacity of giving the Pulitzer Prize for commentary to a Gazan poet who excused the abduction of Israelis by Hamas, and we called for the award to be rescinded.
Mosab Abu Toha, who also spread antisemitic content and fake news on his social media platforms, won the top honor in journalism for his essays published in The New Yorker describing the war.
In virulent social media posts, Abu Toha disparaged female Israeli hostages, questioned their hostage status, and implicitly justified their abduction.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he wrote. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [-year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed on 10/7... So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage?’”
I reached out to Damari and got her to write a heartfelt letter, in which she pleaded with the Pulitzer Committee to take back the prize after he mocked her 471 days in Hamas captivity. She reminded the committee that she and her friends had been abducted from their homes on Kibbutz Kfar Aza as civilians.
“You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity, and yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered,” Damari wrote. “Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial. This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.”
Abu Toha also cast doubt on the IDF’s forensic evidence that showed that the Bibas children were killed by their captors, and slammed the BBC for reporting it.
In his social media posts months after winning the prize, Abu Toha continued to bash the BBC for reporting Israel’s side at all. He used profanities like: “F*** you BBC” and “Who gives a f*** what Israel says.”
While the Pulitzer Committee never rescinded the prize to Abu Toha, it did react to the campaign I initiated at HonestReporting: The committee simply eliminated the award for commentary and decided to stop giving it.
From this year on, there are prizes for opinion pieces, but the last Pulitzer winner for commentary will be its most shameful and profane.
After awarding it to Alghorra this year, the Pulitzers may as well drop the pretense next year and rename the “breaking news photography” category for what it really is: the Pulitzer Prize for Propaganda.■
The writer served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post and has lectured about Israel in all 50 US states.
