Why is MSNBC contributing to the outrageous maligning of released hostage Emily Damari, held in Hamas captivity for well over a year?
In a May 12 interview with Mosab Abu Toha, MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin, Antonio Hylton and Catherine Rampell failed to correct the record after the Pulitzer Prize winner falsely identified released hostage Emily Damari as a soldier. Even now, several days after CAMERA first called out the media outlet on the gross misinformation, the network has neglected to set the record straight.
Abu Toha’s fallacious identification of Damari as a soldier is wholly in line with the pro-Hamas sentiment rampant for years on Arabic social media marking all Israelis as legitimate military targets: “The Palestinian is a civilian even if he takes up arms, and the Israeli is a colonizer even if he rests on the beach.”
At 2:54 into the interview, Catherine Rampell queried Abu Toha concerning his controversial Meta posts about hostages held by Hamas, asking him about his comments in which he said “most of the hostages held by Hamas are not actually hostages. I believe you singled out Emily Damari, who is a 28-year-old. . . ” At approximately 6:25, Abu Toha then mentions a cousin he says was buried under the rubble and continues, referring to Damari, who lost two fingers during her kidnapping:
She [the cousin] was killed. She was not kidnapped. She did not lose two fingers. I lost members of my family. And this is not to minimize her suffering. But why should we humanize this soldier? And she was a soldier. And the other hostage was a soldier too. So I’m not making stories up. I was questioning why should we sympathize with this soldier who a few days later after her release went to celebrate who? Her sister who graduated from the air force. What is the Israeli air force? They are responsible for the killing of my family.
Emily Damari’s destroyed Kibbutz Kfar Aza home from which she was brutally kidnapped (Photo by Tamar Sternthal)
According to the Daily Mail:
While Emily served as a police border guard, she was targeted and kidnapped as a civilian. Her distraught family had to conceal this fact over fears of what might happen if Hamas found out.
CAMERA was not able to find any independent confirmation of the Daily Mail‘s reporting that she was a border police guard — not a soldier, as Abu Toha claimed — at the time of her kidnapping. Regardless, the fact that she was kidnapped as a civilian from her own home, and not in the framework of any kind of military or police activity, is verified fact.
Abu Toha’s social media post had previously falsely claimed that Damari is a soldier, so MSNBC should have been well equipped to address this falsehood and refute it. And no point, however, did Rampell, Mohelydin or Hylton correct Abu Toma’s false claim about Damari.
Moreover, though CAMERA contacted the network regarding the unchallenged falsehood several days ago, MSNBC has yet to broadcast or publish a correction.
Dear Members of the @PulitzerPrizes board,
My name is Emily Damari. I was held hostage in Gaza for over 500 days.
On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border…
— Emily Damari (@EmilyDamari1) May 8, 2025
Demonstrating extreme sensitivity for the hardships that Abu Toha and his family face, Hylton posed her first question to the Palestinian writer: “I want to begin by asking you how you are doing. There’s much to celebrate in this win but at the same time you have family that is still in Gaza facing so much on a day to day basis. How are you feeling right now?”
Emily, too, has dear ones in the Gaza Strip, held as hostages in horrific circumstances by Hamas. Her best friends, twin brothers Gal and Ziv Berman, civilians kidnapped from their homes, are still in the Gaza Strip. As she wrote in a wrenching rebuke to the Pulitzer Prize board expressing her “pain and shock” given the award to Abu Toha, “even now, after returning home, I carry that darkness with me – because my best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels.”
As MSNBC so sensitively expresses concern for Abu Toha, the network contributes to the pain of released hostage Emily Damari by giving an uncontested platform to Abu Toha’s gross falsehood about her circumstances of her kidnapping from her home.
Previously, CBS has corrected after misidentifying released hostage Arbel Yahoud, also a civilian, as a soldier. In addition, The Los Angeles Times corrected after falsely reporting that most of the remaining hostages are soldiers.
Damari’s status as a soldier is just one of Abu Toha’s falsehoods which the three MSNBC hosts allow to stand unchallenged. In his zeal to grotesquely flip perpetrators and victims, Pulitzer prize winner also leveled the false accusations of genocide and starvation.
Stay tuned for any updates.
CAMERA updated this post on May 20 to reflect the Daily Mail‘s reporting that she had served as a border police guard.