The photographs are wrenching. No child should be so horribly gaunt, ribs protruding from his skin, the circumferences of his wrists half normal size.
The pictures are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 3.9 million of its people are classified as Phase 4 in the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which indicates “emergency” levels of hunger.”
Similar photos, reflecting similar catastrophes, come from Somalia, where four million people face severe food shortages. Starvation is prevalent in Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, too.
Note the absence in that list of Gaza, despite the widespread report—swallowed whole and eagerly by media and politicians worldwide who seem less concerned about Africa, Arabia or Asia—of rampant starvation in the region.
Is there a humanitarian crisis—i.e., shortages of food and medicine—in Gaza? Yes, as there has been in every war zone in human history. Are children across the region dying of starvation? No indisputable evidence has been put forward to confirm that claim.
What has been put forward, and forward and forward, are photos of crying citizens holding up pots and baskets at food distribution sites, and of emaciated children.
Like Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, whose tiny, frail body was featured above the fold on the front page of The New York Times and equally prominent in media around the world. The UK’s Daily Express all-caps headlined a photo of the boy: “FOR PITY’S SAKE STOP THIS NOW.”
The Times claimed that the boy had been born healthy but was suffering from severe malnutrition. That was a lie, as investigative journalist David Collier discovered. Mohammed has cerebral palsy and suffers from a suspected genetic disorder. An uncropped photo of the suffering boy revealed a nearby toddler sibling looking quite healthy.
On July 30, the paper, in an “Editor’s Note” (though unposted on its main social media account), acknowledged that medical records had been provided to it indicating that Mohammed “had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development”—an “additional detail [that] gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.” Well, yes, it does, thank you.
Numerous outlets, including The Times, also claimed that “Mohammed’s father was killed last year when he went to seek food.” No evidence was provided for that assertion, and there are grounds to suspect that he was killed during a confrontation between Gazan men (of unknown but imaginable affiliation) and IDF soldiers on Al-Qassabeeb Street in the northern Gaza city Jabalia.
Another widely circulated image of an emaciated Palestinian child, five-year-old Osama al-Rakab, was likewise used to accuse Israel of starving children in Gaza. Osama also suffers from a serious genetic illness, and Israel enabled him to leave Gaza back on June 12 to receive treatment abroad.
Contrast that with the video Hamas, in its purposeful, utter cruelty, recently released showing one of their hostages, Evyatar David, who was a healthy young man when kidnapped, in a practically skeletal state. You won’t see that photo on many, if any, front pages.
From March to May, after assessing that enough aid had accumulated in Gaza to last for several months, Israel blocked additional aid from entering the Strip.
That blockade was later lifted, and the US-Israel Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been providing food and medicine, although wild surges of Gazans at distribution sites have resulted in attempts to control crowds, causing casualties. Now, Israel has paused all fighting in large swaths of the Strip for ten hours each day, to facilitate the provision of even more aid by land and air.
There’s a hungry-for-attention elephant in the room here, apparently invisible to Israel’s knee-jerk detractors. I pointed it out in a letter to the editor that appeared in The New York Times on July 21.
It was written in response to a lengthy essay in the paper by Brown University Professor Omer Bartov, who jumped on the “label Israel genocidal” bandwagon.
I wrote, in part, that “In his lengthy lamentation…Mr. Bartov somehow overlooks a most germane distinction between Israel’s war to vanquish an enemy bent on its destruction and murderous campaigns like those that took place in Bosnia, Darfur, Armenia, Rwanda and Cambodia—and certainly the one carried out by Nazi Germany.
“It is a strange sort of ‘genocide’ that can end immediately with the rulers of the attacked region simply laying down their arms, releasing those they kidnapped who are still alive and leaving the scene.”
Starvation in Gaza? No. Need and suffering? Yes. But, dear world, put the blame where it belongs.
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