Pulitzer Prize-winning Gaza photo award prompts scrutiny over media imagery and context

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced this week, with a top honor going to Saher Alghorra, a New York Times photographer who published several images from the war in Gaza. While announcing the award, the Pulitzer Prize committee praised Alghorra “for his haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.”

The award drew scrutiny in some circles after The New York Times acknowledged that one of the most widely circulated images published by Alghorra was misleading. The image, which appeared on the paper’s front page on July 25, 2025, alongside a story alleging that Israel was deliberately starving Palestinian civilians in the Strip, showed 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq.

However, later in July 2025, freelance investigative journalist David Collier published a medical report which provided details of the child’s medical condition, including his diagnosis of pre-existing medical conditions, including cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, both of which affect his physical appearance.

The NYT later published an acknowledgement that the child in the image had "pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development," while the story and the caption that originally accompanied the picture implied that he was suffering from malnutrition.

This is one of several reported incidents over the years in which major international media outlets have used images and/or commentary portraying Israel in a negative light, which were later found to be misleading, unrelated to the accompanying story, or otherwise used in a way that conveyed a false impression. However, the Times’ decision to acknowledge a mistake is considered relatively unusual.

Notably, other international media outlets, including Sky News, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and The Times of London, all used Mohammed's photo to add weight to narratives that were highly critical of Israel, although it’s unclear if these outlets were aware of the issues.

Collier also noted that other photographs published by Alghorra showed the child, his mother, and his older brother, none of whom appeared to be suffering from malnutrition. This inconsistency was also acknowledged by some members of the Times editorial board, though the paper continued to publish highly critical coverage of the war in Gaza, which often implied that Israel was responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population.

Israeli officials denied accusations that they were using starvation as a weapon against the civilian population, saying that the reason so many civilians in Gaza were not getting enough to eat was that Hamas members were stealing humanitarian aid and that the United Nations was not willing to distribute the aid in its custody for various reasons. The international media largely ignored these claims, while some lawmakers in Western countries openly declared that they did not believe the Israeli narrative.

Furthermore, Alghorra published many other photographs of the conflict in Gaza that implied there was widespread starvation, including images of civilians in Gaza lining up to receive humanitarian aid, wounded children being brought to clinics and civilians trying to mark the Muslim festival of Ramadan inside heavily damaged buildings.

Some of these images have previously been honored with the World Press Photo Award, to which he responded by saying, “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. Each image in this series carries the weight of what we have lived through. The images – and the screams – are engraved in me.”

The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917 through the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is awarded annually by Columbia University for achievements in journalism, arts, and letters. Its categories span journalism and the arts, including reporting (breaking, investigative, international, national, and local), commentary and criticism, feature and explanatory writing, photography, editorial writing, public service, as well as literary and artistic fields such as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, music, biography and memoir.