Famine pornography won't help Gaza.
Photographs of Gazan children are repeatedly being manipulated, while these children have no choice about whether they should be used as sick clickbait to make a lie-infested political point.
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This is a guest essay by Nicole Lampert, a journalist and commentator, chronicling life as a diaspora Jew in all its weird and sometimes lonely glory.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The situation in Gaza is complex; there is real hunger in pockets of the population (hopefully now being mainly alleviated as the food trucks start to go in in larger numbers), and I don’t want to deny the ongoing horrors of war for either Palestinians or Israelis.
But this piece is about the perverse way sick children in Gaza are being used on the front pages of national newspapers, which too easily feeds into the Hamas narrative while demonising Israelis and ultimately Jews. This use of “fake news” or at least “not-telling-the-whole-story news” is also damaging the trade I love.
The latest example came courtesy of The Mirror at the weekend, when it used a heart-breaking image of 3-year-old Karim Muammer, complete with skinny arms and distended stomach, along with the headline: “Stop Starving Gaza’s Kids.”
The picture of Karim Muammer was captioned, “PLEASE HELP: Karim Muammer has severe malnutrition in hospital at Khan Yunis, Gaza.” Inside the paper, a second picture of Karim said, that he was “skin and bone from malnutrition.”
But that’s not why Karim looked so unwell. As Israeli organisation COGAT — which oversees civilian policy in Gaza — quickly showed with paperwork, Karim is a very sick child: He suffers from Fanconi syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects the liver, kidneys, and intestines, disrupting the absorption of essential nutrients.
It is unusual for an Israeli government organisation to criticise a specific British newspaper, but as COGAT said in a tweet: “Hamas continues to spread false narratives as part of a deceptive propaganda campaign, while media outlets around the world continue to serve as their platform without any verification.”
Hamas is winning the information war only because it has so many Western enablers.
Over the same weekend, the Mirror’s Reach stablemate, The Daily Star, used the image of another sick child to illustrate a story on the alleged famine. This was emaciated 5-year-old Yamen Zayed — his arms outstretched as if he were pleading for food. Once again, it did not mention that this is a child with an underlying illness: He has polio, as the caption from the photographic agency Getty, which sent out the photograph, made clear.
Reach, in particular, should by now know to be more careful. Two weeks ago, investigative journalist David Collier revealed how another sick child was used was wrongly used an image for famine in the Mirror. He revealed how 9-year-old Maryam Abdulaziz Mahmoud Davvas — who was photographed under the headline, “Haunting image of skeletal girl, 9, shows Gaza’s ‘catastrophic’ hunger crisis” — was seriously ill and many steps had been taken to make her better.
Maryam, whose image was also used to “prove” starvation in the Irish Independent and LA Times, suffers from intestinal malabsorption. Her body can’t absorb nutrients even when food and medicine are given. The agency photographs of this poor, emaciated girl, who has no choice about whether her half-naked body should be used as sick clickbait to make a political point, showed her with her healthy-looking brother. He was cropped out of the photographs.
Collier, who revealed that her treatment at a hospital in Gaza (yes, they are still there) included intravenous fluids, potassium chloride, high levels of vitamin A, antibiotics, therapeutic food and milk, wrote: “Instead of helping Maryam get out of Gaza to get the specialist care she needs, the media turned her into a famine mascot. That doesn’t just exploit her. It endangers her.”
And it was another Reach newspaper, The Daily Express, which had a now infamous front page that it was initially incredibly proud of; it even influenced the New York Times. Both papers featured the skeletal features of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq while cutting his healthy-looking brother out of the photographs and failing to mention that this was a child born with severe genetic disorders who had needed specialist medical supplements since birth.
Remarkably, the BBC still features a substantial piece on Muhammad on its website and social media page, which hasn’t been updated to include his illness.
Reach publications (which feature many brilliant, hard-working journalists) aren’t the only British newspapers to have featured sick children as children being starved by Israel. They almost all have; journalists tend to follow a pack-like mentality. These photographs and others of sick children have been used in newspapers around the world. A separate investigation by The Free Press of a dozen of them resulted in the journalists who wrote it being called “genocide deniers.”
Many of the parents of these frail and unwell children allowed them to be photographed without their clothes because they hoped publicity would help get their children out of Gaza to get the crucial medical aid they need. Instead, they have been used as pawns in an information war that will not help them. In fact, it might even keep them in Gaza, as Hamas has seen how useful they are. They are being used as starvation pornography.
The excuse will be used — and has been used — that this is what will happen if you don’t let international journalists into Gaza. But if they are the same journalists ignoring actual picture captions from photo agencies telling them these are sick children, can we really expect neutrality?
(Editor’s note: The main reason that Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza without IDF escort is because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad will attempt to murder the journalists and then blame Israel for their deaths.)
The use of images in this way won’t exactly persuade Israel to let in reporters. All it has done is show them that a side has been chosen: that Western journalists are determined to make the Israelis seem as monstrous as they can.
You can argue — as I would — that Israel’s decision to change the aid system to stop Hamas benefiting from it and bring them to the negotiating table was a horribly wrong and dangerous thing to do. It has also gifted Hamas a huge public relations victory.
Ironically, all these stories about famine using these emotive images whipped up a public fury and helped lead to the UK, France, and Canada announcing they were going to recognise a Palestinian statehood. That, in turn, led to Hamas walking out of ceasefire talks a few weeks ago, since they felt the West was back on their side. So this painful war we all want to end continues.
But this consistent failure of journalistic ethics is a different matter. How are our audiences meant to trust us when we are withholding key parts of a story to make a political point, not just once but repeatedly? That does not make us virtuous, however important we think the point might be. It damages all of us by ruining our credibility.
And the use of these emotive images also creates danger: the lies of Israelis wanting — actually wanting — to kill children. That Jews are uniquely malevolent monsters. This is the blood libel, a retelling of a story that has stalked us for nearly 1,000 years. It has led to Jews being murdered and thrown out of countries.
The echo of “baby killers” comes down the centuries. It is truly chilling to see it play out on the front pages of today’s media outlets.
 | A guest post by
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As long as Hamas runs Gaza we will be subjected to propaganda of this nature
Thank you for this informative article. The Palestinian narrative is
based on many lies.