Pulitzer Prize Shame
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This year’s Pulitzer Prizes reward misleading and false photos and writing.
Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary who prospered in America as journalist and newspaper owner, endowed the Pulitzer Prize to recognize excellence in journalism.
Today, the Pulitzer Prize committee is damaging its illustrious legacy by awarding journalists who slander Israel and Zionists. Its 2026 Prizes also honor figures who propagate falsehoods about the Jewish state.
Saher Alghorra, a 28-year-old independent freelancer living in Gaza, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. The Pulitzer committee says they are rewarding “his haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.” In reality, they are rewarding highly misleading photos snapped with the blessing of and in cooperation with Hamas.
Alghorra’s most famous shot, published on the front page of the New York Times on July 24, 2025, was quickly exposed as a lie. It shows a young, nearly naked boy, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, being cradled by his mother. His spine and ribs protrude through his skin. Mohammed’s appearance is horrifying; he is clearly very ill and underweight. “Mohammed…was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition,” the New York Times asserted in its caption. Elsewhere in the article, the New York Times asserted that “Gazans are Dying of Starvation,” placed the blame for hunger in Gaza entirely on Israel, and reported that: “Hollow-eyed, skeletal children languish on hospital beds…” with Mohammed illustrating this terrible phenomenon.
Within days, readers noted that posts about the family existed elsewhere online, describing Mohammed not as starving but as suffering from a degenerative muscle disorder which contributed to his emaciated state.
This should have been obvious to Alghorra and his editors. In one of Alghorra’s photos of Mohammed that was not published by the New York Times, Mohammed’s older brother - who does not appear malnourished - appears standing in the background. The entire photograph seemed designed to promote a misleading narrative about the severity of food shortages in Gaza. Why?
Every journalist operating inside Gaza today, including photographers like Saher Alghorra, does so with the express permission of Hamas. One of the most cogent descriptions of the condition for journalists inside Gaza comes from Bret Stephens, who has covered the region for decades for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and notes that journalists inside Gaza function as mouthpieces for Hamas propaganda.
He writes: “The Palestinian territories…are republics of fear - fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are neither more nor less honest than people elsewhere But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.”
Take another one of his Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, of Hamas soldiers carrying the remains of a murdered Israeli hostage to an exchange point to hand over the remains to Israel. The photo is incredible: Alghorra was directly in front of the Hamas fighters when he snapped the photo, at what was obviously an important and sensitive moment. This picture could only have been taken with Hamas’ permission; it’s unthinkable that a truly independent photographer would have been granted such access to Hamas’ elite fighting units.
Indeed, a perusal of Alghorra’s Instagram feed shows how embedded he is in a number of terrorist groups in Gaza, including Hamas, the fearsome “Lions Den” terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Islamic Jihad. Over the past few years, he’s photographed militants with all these organizations up close and with seeming permission from their leaders.
Saher Alghorra might be a talented photographer with an eye for artistic composition. He is also an extension of Hamas and its allied terrorist groups, granted access to their inner workings in exchange for parroting their propaganda. Despite this, he’s won awards for his propaganda masquerading as independent journalism. The Pulitzer committee just awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Hamas’ lies.
At least Saher Alghorra has the excuse of living under Hamas’ tyrannical rule to excuse his lies about Israel. M. Gessen, who has won a Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing for a series of articles in the New York Times, has no such excuse.
A Jewish journalist from Moscow, M. Gessen has had a distinguished journalist career, and has seemed to abandon all journalistic caution in one of their prize-winning essays, “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” which singles out Israel out of the world's nations for opprobrium. Gessen describes both countries as showing a “monster” face to the world. Spoiler alert: when it comes to Israel, Gessen’s answer to how to remain a “good” person is simple: leave Israel entirely. The Jewish state is supposedly too bad for “good” people to live in any more. Anyone who does is “implicated” in its “crimes.”
Gessen baselessly asserts that Israel has “all but dropped any pretense of democracy.” No mention is made of the many Arab Members of Parliament, judges, teachers, doctors, police officers, etc. inside of Israel, nor of the fact that Arab citizens of Israel participate fully in Israeli democracy just as Jews and others do. Gessen explains they didn’t interview any non-Jews for their prize-winning piece - presumably because it’s only Jewish Israelis who need to be taught to be “good.”
One of Gessen’s interviewees rails against Jewish Israelis: “I know how bad he smells,” she says of one. No similar criticism is directed at non-Jews, who are depicted as peaceful.
Gessen quotes at length two Israelis who’ve left the country. “I had to get away,” one explained, saying he and his family moved to Italy. A second interviewee spends most of her time in an Arab town under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Assiduously left out of Gessen’s prize-winning essay is any background about the wider situation in which Israel finds itself, with Hamas continuing to launch missiles, drones, and even incendiary kites into Israel on a regular basis, and Hezbollah in Lebanon raining missiles down on Israeli communities.
Gessen quotes Israelis who want the rest of the world to boycott, sanction, and isolate Israel, treating it as an international pariah. It’s only by destroying Israel, Gessen’s piece implies, that Jewish Israelis can be called “good.” This isn’t journalism; it’s Hamas propaganda, which would see the entire world turn against Israel and side with Hamas in aiming to destroy it.
The Pulitzer Prize’s descent into reflexive anti-Israel advocacy is a serious blow for Western journalism. By rewarding openly biased, misleading, pro-Hamas, and antisemitic articles and photographs, they are chipping away at journalistic standards, and at our ability to distinguish robust, independent journalism from propaganda.
This year’s Pulitzer Prizes are a reminder that we all have to be vigilant in scrutinizing the media we consume.
