Pulitzer Prizes honour journalists’ coverage of Israel-Gaza war
The war in Gaza featured prominently in the announced winners of Pulitzer Prizes on May 7th, with a variety of media outlets receiving high praise for their extensive coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Arab Weekly and agencies reported.
The New York Times won a Pulitzer in international reporting for its “wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’s lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7,” as well as “the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response” that followed.
Meanwhile, Reuters won for breaking news photography — singled out for its “raw and urgent” coverage of the October 7th attack and Israeli response, also recognising “journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza.”
“This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers,” the committee said. “As the Pulitzer Prizes honour categories of journalism, arts and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”
The prize recognised jailed Russian opposition politician and Washington Post contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza, who currently is serving a 25-year jail sentence in Russia — the longest known sentence of Putin’s jailed critics — on charges of “treason” following his accusation of Russia’s “war crimes” against Ukraine.
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The committee cited his “passionate columns written at great personal risk from his prison cell warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting for a democratic future for his country.”
The awards were distributed at Columbia University, where administrators recently called upon police to forcibly clear out pro-Palestinian protesters. The police largely blocked media from the scene and threatened student journalists covering the events with arrest.
On December 21st, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) announced that Israel’s war on Gaza has become the most deadly for media workers, with the most journalists killed in a single year in one place.
Earlier this week on May 6th, an Israeli airstrike hit the house of Palestinian journalist Mustafa Ayad, killing him.
“The Israeli army has killed more journalists in 10 weeks than any other army or entity has in any single year,” said Sherif Mansour, the CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa programme coordinator. “And with every journalist killed, the war becomes harder to document and to understand.”
The Arab Weekly and agencies
