The Media Lets Hamas Fool It Yet Again About ‘Starving Gazans’

Much of the world’s media has been showing photographs of emaciated children in Gaza, to support the monstrous charge that Israel is “deliberately starving the children of Gaza.” But it turns out that several of those photos were of children whose condition was the result not of starvation at all, but of congenital illnesses, including cerebral palsy. Once the Israelis had presented the evidence of such illnesses and also pointed out that the siblings of those who were supposedly being starved looked perfectly healthy and well-fed, a few of the media outlets did admit to their mistake. Even the BBC had to acknowledge the truth. Yet within a week, the same media were engaging in the same hideous false reporting. They showed photographs not of a child, but of a 20-year-old Gaza woman, who in appearance was seemingly starving. But it turned out that she wasn’t starving at all, but was a victim of leukemia. The Israelis arranged for her to be airlifted out of Gaza to a hospital in Italy, where, despite the best efforts of Italian doctors, she died — of leukemia, not starvation.

The British journalist David Collier was understandably horrified that within the space of one week, much of the world’s media repeated the calumny, easily disproven, about these emaciated Gazans being the victims of deliberate starvation by the IDF. More of his comment on the matter can be found here: “Rinse and Repeat: Another Gaza Famine Lie Goes Viral,” David Collier, August 17, 2025:

…Once bitten, twice – bite me again

What makes this latest famine hoax even more astonishing is that it comes barely a week after the last one collapsed. In that case, international outlets took the image of a child with healthy siblings, a boy suffering from a tragic but very specific medical condition (CP) and presented him as evidence of mass starvation.

The lie was so blatant that even the New York Times and other major outlets were forced to roll back their claims once the truth emerged.

Incredibly, the same terrorist-supporting journalist – Ahmed al-Arini – appears to have broken both stories (1, 2).

This is not sloppy journalism. It is not an innocent mistake. It is the same trick, deployed twice in as many weeks, by the same actors. That is proof that legacy media are not being misled – they are knowingly promoting a lie.

So what is the truth?

We live in an age where too many journalists have become activists, media standards have collapsed, and editors are chasing clicks with sensationalism over accuracy. When the story can be shaped to fit a preferred narrative, fact-checking is abandoned. The presence of 1000s of journalists in the UK who once worked for foreign Islamist outfits makes a bad situation even worse.

So if there is no famine, if starvation is not widespread, then what is really happening?

The honest answer ‘its complicated’ won’t suffice. Not when we are facing a coordinated media campaign that promotes a modern-day blood libel. So I am going to generalise.

For context – in the UK today there are currently about 86000 children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions.

To support the ‘famine’ narrative, The recent Sky News said hospitals are ‘overwhelmed’ with cases. Yes – so are the UK hospitals and we are not even in a war-zone.  There were over 3000 recorded child deaths in the UK in 2023. Over 400 people die in the UK each year from malnutrition.

Now imagine a desperate conflict here. A journalist could walk into an NHS ward, take images of desperately ill children, and spin them as evidence of deliberate starvation by our enemy. Technically nothing about the picture would be false, but the framing and narrative would be a lie. That is exactly what is happening now in Gaza.

Take the latest BBC coverage – a headline that feeds the false famine narrative, suggesting starvation-related death. A child’s image used to create additional emotional pull. Only buried deep in the text does the article admit it is likely the woman suffered from a ‘serious congenital disease’. This is not journalism. This is manipulation.

How many readers of the story would get to that point, deep in the report, that notes that the emaciated woman in the photograph was suffering not from starvation, but from a “serious congenital disease”? In her case, it was leukemia (as the Italian doctors who treated her also testified). Or if they did read to the end, wouldn’t they by that point already have convinced themselves that the person shown was a victim of deliberate starvation by the endlessly cruel IDF, and would be unlikely to change their mind.

We would like the offending media, that have been accepting and passing on Hamas propaganda about “Gazans being deliberately starved,” to apologize and set the record straight. Above all, the BBC, with its worldwide reach and tens of millions of listeners, should make amends by telling its audience how wrong it was in attributing the emaciated appearance of several Gazans to deliberate starvation instead of to their congenital illnesses. Then it should explain that it, too, was also a victim of Hamas fraud, provided with photos of emaciated Gazans who were suffering not from starvation, but from congenital illnesses, and that it would do everything it could to make sure that it would not be fooled again by Hamas.