The New York Times was awarded a coveted Pulitzer Prize on Monday — one of three the newspaper won — for its “wide-ranging” coverage of “Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.” 

Yet the Times’s list of winning Israel and Gaza work, which topped the International Reporting category, notably excluded the chilling December report by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella about Hamas displaying “a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”

The Times did not include the Hamas rape piece as part of its package of Gaza stories it submitted to the  Pulitzer Committee for consideration for the International Reporting award. A source familiar with the matter tells the Sun that the piece was submitted for another category and did not win, and noted that the Times has some 1,700 war coverage stories, many of which are not included in the prizes.  

The Hamas rape article, “Screams Without Words,” caused an uproar among the Times’s anti-Israel staffers, who tried to find problems with the article and leaked about internal feuding to the Intercept, a left-wing publication. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Times launched an internal investigation to try to find the leakers. It was inconclusive. 

“The New York Times has invested more than any other U.S. newspaper to help readers understand the complexities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over the past decade and we have some of the world’s most experienced reporters, photographers and analysts on the ground to ensure our reporting of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the Israeli counterattack in Gaza is nuanced, steeped in context and expertise,” the senior vice president of external communications at the Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, tells the Sun. “Regarding the Dec. 28 investigation, we’re confident in the accuracy our our reporting and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence during this conflict.” 

The most prestigious of the prizes, the Public Service award, went to a left-wing nonprofit news outlet, ProPublica, for a series of pieces investigating the travel and entertainment expenses of two conservative Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The pieces were described by the Pulitzer judges as “groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court” to show how “a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct.”

A Pulitzer also went to a former ProPublica writer, Hannah Dreier, who has since moved to the Times, for her Times reporting on the suffering of child migrants who work jobs in America.

Soon after the announcement, the ProPublica’s award for its Supreme Court coverage received criticism from some on social media for bias toward far-left reporting. 

“ProPublica is a propaganda outlet bankrolled by left-wing billionaires to attack the conservative Supreme Court justices,” the president of Judicial Network, Carrie Severino, wrote on X. “They were just awarded a Pulitzer for their smear campaign.” 

“In recent years, the Pulitzer Prize has become a joke. It solely exists to reward left wing activists with an award,” Senator Cruz’s former communications advisor, Steve Guest, wrote.

The awards, announced at Columbia University on Monday afternoon, also included prizes for Reuters for a series of negative articles about entrepreneur Elon Musk, who’s become increasingly politically conservative in the last year. The Pulitzer judges called the pieces  “eye-opening.” 

In addition to the prizes, the Pulitzer Board issued a special statement to recognize student journalists covering protests “in the face of great personal and academic risk.”

“We would also like to acknowledge the extraordinary real-time reporting of student journalists at Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes are housed, as the New York Police Department was called onto campus on Tuesday night,” the Board wrote. “In the spirit of press freedom, these students worked to document a major national news event under difficult and dangerous circumstances and at risk of arrest.”