There have been a number (way too few) exposés of the “Israel is starving Gazans” lie. The latest is Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova’s article for The Free Press, thefp.com. Here is how it begins:
For the past several weeks, critics have fumed at The New York Times over a misleading photo of an 18-month-old boy in Gaza on its front page. It turns out that Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, who was a symbol for a story about widespread hunger in Gaza, wasn’t simply suffering from malnutrition. He had preexisting health issues “affecting his brain and his muscle development,” according to an updated version of the story. But that detail didn’t find its way into print.
When the so-called paper of record updated its story with an editors note four days later, it also quietly deleted the mother’s claim that her son was “born a healthy child.” There was still no mention of the boy’s brother, who appears healthy in the background of another photo that appeared online.
This incident wasn’t just a one-off.
An investigation by The Free Press reveals that at least a dozen other viral images of starvation in Gaza also lacked important context: The subjects of those photos have significant health problems. Those appeared all over social media, in the reports of leading international aid organizations, and on some of the most prestigious news outlets in the United States, including CNN, NPR, and the Times—without disclosing the complicated medical histories that help explain their stark appearances.
It’s not that there isn’t hunger in Gaza. There is. The World Health Organization reported 63 deaths from malnutrition last month alone, including 25 children. Some of them might have been sick or worse even if there was no war. In 2022, about 50 Gazans under the age of 20 died from malnutrition, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Yannay Spitzer, an economist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been tracking food prices in Gaza during the past few months, said hunger in Gaza is largely declining since Israel resumed aid deliveries in late May after its nearly 80-day blockade. In mid-July, prices for basic necessities like flour skyrocketed by 4,000 percent, according to his review of data from the Gaza Chamber of Commerce and the World Food Programme.
“If a situation like that lasts more than a few days, a lot of people will go hungry but not starve to death en masse. That’s the beginning of a process, which the media portrayed as already at the catastrophic end stage,” Spitzer said, before pausing. “But it never happened.”
Still, he said, food prices are “15 times higher than peacetime,” but are nowhere near their high point earlier this summer. “It’s very different from these Ethiopian-like famine pictures that readers in the West were led to believe in.”
But those photos have helped convince a growing number of Americans that Israel has induced famine and is committing war crimes in Gaza.
The truth? Any starvation in Gaza is entirely – 100% – the fault of hamas.
hamas started the war that caused Israel’s response, and hamas is the terrorist/we don’t give a damn about our own people group that expropriates truck after truck of food and supplies sent into Gaza, takes what it wants, and sells what is left to the people it is supposed to protect for unconscionable prices.
Please, please use the link I’ve provided (here it is again) and read every word of this article.
And please, please don’t be shy about educating people whose “knowledge” of Gaza is restricted to what they see/hear/read in most of our media, because they probably don’t have a clue about what is really happening there.
