Palestinian photographer who captured ‘devastation and starvation in Gaza’ wins Pulitzer

Prize committee praises Saher Alghorra’s ‘haunting, sensitive’ work; his front-page NYT photo of emaciated child who had preexisting medical issue sparked scrutiny of famine claims

A New York Times photographer working in Gaza was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for photography for pictures taken during the war between Israel and Hamas.

The prize committee said it was honoring Saher Alghorra “for his haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.”

One of Alghorra’s front-page pictures, published in July 2025, showed an emaciated boy being cradled by his mother. It became a symbol of allegations of widespread starvation in the territory — and a target of criticism by those, including the Israeli government, who rejected the claim that it was intentionally causing hunger there.

Pictures of the boy, Mohammed al-Mutawaq, also appeared in Sky News, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and the Times of London.

But several days after the photo appeared on The New York Times’ front page, freelance investigative journalist David Collier reported on his website that a May 2025 medical report from Gaza stated that Mohammed was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and suffers from hypoxemia, or low levels of oxygen in the blood, possibly linked to a suspected genetic disorder.

Collier also noted in his article that other photos from the same sets, used by major outlets, showed Mohammed’s mother and his older brother, who look to be of normal weight.

The New York Times subsequently altered the story to note that the boy suffered from a medical issue that inhibited muscle development and removed a quote from his mother saying that he had been healthy before the Hamas-led attack that launched the Gaza war on Oct. 7, 2023. But it did not back away from the story’s other claims about starvation in Gaza.

The photographs for which Alghorra was recognized include snapshots of Gazans queuing for food, bringing wounded children for medical care and marking Ramadan inside bombed buildings. They also include a picture of a different emaciated child who became a face of the hunger crisis without attracting the same specific criticism.

Israel blocked the entry of aid into Gaza for 11 weeks last year, and officials acknowledged food shortages. But Israel denied claims of famine, saying that Hamas was preventing aid from reaching Palestinian civilians and that the UN was not distributing aid stockpiled at border crossings.

Alghorra, 28, did not immediately comment online on the Pulitzer, but he wrote on Instagram after winning a different prize last month for a similar set of images, the World Press Photo Award, about what it meant to have his work recognized.

“My heart is heavy with what I have witnessed — and what I was compelled to photograph: lives lost, lives shattered, displacement, hunger, total destruction, and relentless suffering,” he wrote. “Each image in this series carries the weight of what we have lived through. The images—and the screams—are engraved in me.”

Palestinian American author Hala Alyan’s book “I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir,” which interweaves Alyan’s story of infertility with her family’s story of displacement, was a finalist in the memoir and autobiography category.

Several Jewish authors were honored in the prizes, announced Monday afternoon, though none for storytelling about Israel. M Gessen won for opinion writing in The New York Times about rising authoritarianism in the United States, while Bess Wohl won in the drama category for “Liberation,” a play about the 1970s women’s liberation movement that includes a prominent Jewish character.