The Gaza war featured prominently in the Pulitzer Prizes and included a special award for journalists covering the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its "wide-ranging and revealing coverage of the deadly Hamas attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7," as well as for its coverage of "the Israeli army's massive and deadly response."
Meanwhile, Reuters won the breaking news photography award for its "raw and urgent" coverage of the 7 October attack and the Israeli response, and a special certificate was awarded to "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 are awarded in the categories of journalism, art and literature, we mark the loss of invaluable documents of the human experience."
The awards, handed out at Columbia University, come at a time when the New York campus has faced backlash after calling on police to disperse pro-Palestinian protesters. Police largely blocked media access to the scene and threatened student journalists covering the events with arrest.
Two editors of Columbia's student newspaper described in an article over the weekend the university's "suppression" of reporting, including threats of arrest by police and demands by the university to turn over videos and photos.
Other awards were given to reports by American journalists on migrant child labour, racial inequality in the legal system and gun violence.
Author Jane Ann Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel Night Watch, about a mother and daughter during and after the U.S. Civil War. The nonfiction prize was awarded to Nathan Thrall's book, "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: An Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy."
The committee praised "the meticulously reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, told through the portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed because of security rules." / BGNES
