2024 Award Winners

Top Prize: Ruwaida Amer and Ibtisam Mahdi
 

This year we honor journalists Ruwaida Amer and Ibtisam Mahdi, who have demonstrated integrity and courage - two qualities Pierre Sprey held in the highest esteem - in truth-telling amid conditions of stress and horror beyond anything we might have believed possible in a supposedly civilised world.  Ruwaida Amer and Ibtisam Mahdi have chronicled the horror of the ongoing genocide inflicted on their Gaza homeland with unsparing honesty, clarity, and compassion.  They both write for  +972, the Israeli publication that revealed the deployment of computerised target selection in the IDF’s ongoing campaign of massacre.  

“I don’t want to be a number,” Ruwaida wrote recently, describing her own life of repeated displacement and struggles to support her family. “Is it possible that all it would say on my shroud would be ‘a young woman in a black/blue blouse’?

Could I die as an “unknown person”, just a number?
I want everyone around me to remember my story. I am not a number.

I am the girl who studied for high school and university under exceptional circumstances when Gaza was under a very tight siege. I completed university and looked for work everywhere to help my father."
Since the early days of the onslaught, Ruwaida and Ibitsam have given us names behind those ever escalating numbers that have become synonymous with the word “Gaza>” Mothers scraping together scraps of food to feed hungry children, fishermen risking their lives just by putting their boats in the water, olive farmers struggling to harvest the remnants of their ravaged crops. 

Pierre would have been proud and humbled to have his name linked with these brave reporters.