New York Times Covers Up Why Children in Gaza Are Starving
In a recent article, the Times finally exposed the reality of famine in Gaza but corrected itself to hide the forced starvation and genocide.
It’s no secret for anyone remotely paying attention to the ‘war’ in Gaza what is really going on. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to find videos of starving children, mutilated people from bombs, horrific injuries, bullet wounds, and bodies. Hundreds and thousands of bodies come across our screens every day because this is the most documented genocide in human history.
Despite that, the Western media is scrambling to close Pandora’s box. They can’t. The American media establishment does not have the power it once held, and people don’t trust their government like they once had. The Zionist narrative coming from the American media is so flimsy and transparently false that it falls apart as soon as someone sees a video of a mother holding her dead child.
For people who really do believe in equality, there’s nothing that the Palestinians can do or have done to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians and domicide; the destruction of 92% of homes meant to make life impossible. All the ‘complexity’ and ‘nuance’ can’t explain away what we saw happen over 22 months because it isn’t complicated when you watch so much senseless horror. Words alone will never be able to portray the immense scale of suffering and tragedy being forced on Gaza with any sense of accuracy, let alone the unthinkable pain endured by each individual person desperately starving, knowing a bomb could kill them at any moment. For all who have even remotely followed the events of this genocide, it is unconscionable for them to see video of emaciated infants, skeletal bodies, people carrying neighbors soaked in blood, mothers crying in agony, clinging to lifeless bodies, digging children out of rubble, patients burning alive in bombed hospitals, and entertain that these people somehow deserve this.
Contorting all these videos and images into a narrative that somehow makes Israel the less evil party is impossible without two ingredients: racist double standards and a morally bankrupt media apparatus. It begins by relying on an American paradigm that is still poisoned by 9/11-era racism toward Arabs and does not fully comprehend the lessons of desegregation. It expects that Americans will associate Arabs with terrorism without reflecting on their shared humanity. It relies on Americans thinking that Israel must be an exclusively Jewish state because Arabs are so barbaric and subhuman that they must be segregated out of society. It needs to portray this genocide as a holy war that evangelicals can construct a prophecy around. It necessitates that Americans not question what the State Department and corporate media tell them. It requires that the media at the top of the information hierarchy water down, pre-justify, obfuscate, prevaricate, ignore, or lie about what is happening. Without these ingredients, the genocide would not have been possible because there would have been no debate. Instead, those who are outraged at this crime against humanity have to play rhetorical games with these lies from Zionists defending the indefensible.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” “What about October 7th?” “This is a war! Civilians always die in war!” “Does Israel have the right to defend itself?” “Hamas uses human shields!” “Hamas should just release the hostages!” “We cannot trust the ‘Hamas-run’ Health Ministry!” “If you were gay in Gaza, they would throw you off a roof!” “They have tunnels under the hospitals.” These lies and maliciously loaded questions have been repeated ad nauseam to contaminate discourse. Now that Israel is executing a forced starvation campaign, it has generated yet another lie in the media’s arsenal. “Hamas is stealing food from civilians.”
This lie is now a staple of Zionist op-ed writers and pundits who can no longer straight-up deny what is happening but need to operate on half-truths to hold the line. In March, Israel started a complete blockade of all aid to Gaza, which is a deliberate action to exterminate all Palestinian life. Since the beginning of the siege, the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza was already far below what would be required to keep the population healthy. The UN calculates that a minimum of 600 trucks per day is needed to prevent starvation. Since January, just 1388 trucks of aid have been allowed to enter Gaza, an average of less than 7 per day.
So far, a documented 227 people, including 103 children in Gaza, have starved to death, while about a quarter of civilians are facing an imminent risk of starvation, according to the Red Cross. Those numbers also don’t include deaths where starvation was a contributing factor like when a person is severely malnourished but succumbs to disease. One American international aid worker reported losing a significant amount of weight after their short mission to Gaza. They also echoed the reports from other workers of witnessing civilians being randomly shot at aid distribution points. A recent IPC report from July 29th stated that at least 39% of the population is now going days at a time without food. It goes on saying that, “Most households (86 percent) reported regularly not having food to eat of any kind, and nearly all (96 percent) reported that they went to bed hungry multiple times in the last month. Nearly nine out of ten households resorted to extremely severe coping mechanisms to feed themselves, such as taking significant safety risks to obtain food, and scavenging from the garbage.”
Amid this catastrophic human-made crisis, The New York Times, along with other liberal publications that won’t be mentioned here but are equally as guilty, has finally started to report some of the situation accurately. Nonetheless, the Times still uses plenty of tactics to protect the Zionist position by hiding key details, using the least damning statistics, inserting loaded language, subtle finger-pointing, and burying critical caveats toward the end of the piece. Headlines primarily serve to completely flatten the power dynamic and deliver human slaughter with cold, almost bureaucratic language. On July 25th, the Times briefly suspended its cowardice to publish a front page image of a Palestinian mother holding her emaciated 18-month-old baby with their bones showing through their skin. The caption read, “Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. A doctor said the number of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza had risen sharply.”
In the article, a section reads, “Hollow-eyed, skeletal children languish on hospital beds or are cared for by parents, who gaze helplessly at protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and emaciated limbs resembling brittle sticks. The haunting scenes are a stark contrast to the plenty that exists just a few miles away, across the borders with Israel and Egypt.” The full article also includes images of people crowded around food charities with pots, families grieving dead loved ones, and preparing pitiful amounts of food, struggling with the effects of this man-made famine.
Despite the undeniable implications of the article, Zionists and right-wing media ruthlessly attacked the Times for publishing the photo, claiming that the baby had preexisting health conditions to craft the larger narrative that the starvation is fake.
A week later, rather than pushing back against this obviously disingenuous claim, the editors at the Times put out a correction to the article, saying that they “learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had preexisting health problems. Had the Times known the information before publication, it would have been included in the article and the picture caption.” Nowhere in the correction statement do they mention that the child’s birth abnormalities played a trivial role in their condition. Neither does the Times note that proper postnatal care has been made all but impossible by Israel’s targeting of medical facilities and hospitals.
It’s also critical to mention that the effects of the siege have certainly contributed to more pregnancy complications, as water, rest, food, and especially balanced nutrition necessary for a developing fetus have been hard to come by. The insignificant detail that this one child has some existing complication, likely caused by these same horrific conditions in the first place, shouldn’t even need to be mentioned, let alone corrected for. It’s the capitulation to Zionist lies that implicates liberal media as complicit in this genocide.
For the same reason we would treat a Holocaust denier with disregard and animosity, we should treat Zionists who knowingly spew genocide denial with the same energy. The New York Times would surely not make a correction for someone disputing the Rwandan genocide, or trying to revise Holocaust statistics, or try to question if the gas chambers existed, or deny any other genocide, so why would they capitulate to the idea that this child and all of Gaza aren’t actually starving?
But it’s not even a lie that makes sense to hide for Zionists. There are plenty of videos of Israeli citizens trashing aid on trucks and sitting in front of trucks to slow or prevent food from reaching Gaza. This moral depravity has been going on since the siege started; some trucks were even set on fire last year. Much of this comes with complete apathy from the Israeli military, as it is likely government policy to allow citizens to damage aid. It makes no sense for Zionists to both see the intention of Israelis to starve Gaza while also denying that Gaza is starving. On top of it, at Israel’s own distribution points, food received from it has been deliberately damaged, poisoned, moldy, covered in bacteria, or contaminated with mycotoxins. It isn’t an accident.
A few weeks later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called out The New York Times, directly threatening to sue them over their coverage of the starvation in an exclusive interview. “It’s such clear defamation,” he says regarding the images published on the front page.
Notice how Netanyahu, as someone with world-class American media training, flips so quickly between building a false narrative and finger-pointing. He knows that few people watching actually read the article, and therefore, he can get away with saying anything to this Fox News audience. He vaguely mentions three examples of children who represent “supposedly starving children,” emphasizing their conditions, cerebral palsy, and cystic fibrosis. “It’s nothing to do with starvation.” It does. People with cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis do not look like they are starving to death.
When given the slightest push back by the ‘journalist,’ Netanyahu defensively claims starvation is “because Hamas is interdicting aid.” Even Netanyahu can’t deny there is suffering; he admits that much. It’s a disgrace that this ‘journalist’ sitting across from this war criminal does not insist on how that’s even possible if trucks aren’t entering Gaza. And that is how lies begin to dictate reality: journalists like this refusing to do their ethical duty to pressure for the truth.
Rather than fighting back, The New York Times put out a post on their communications account, timidly correcting Netanyahu’s lie. They reminded readers that they did issue a correction after the post and that people in Gaza are in fact malnourished. They went on to say, “Attempts to threaten independent media providing vital information and accountability to the public are unfortunately an increasingly common playbook, but journalists continue to report from Gaza for the Times, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.” Besides the laughable claim that the Times is ‘independent’ and not a private for-profit corporation, they at least allude that Netanyahu is lying. But how, in the face of a lawsuit threat, does such an organization not use stronger language? The Times writers are describing a systematic propaganda campaign to cover genocide as just a part of a ‘playbook?’ It’s blatant cowardice.
Once again, the Times ignored the overtly false claim made by Netanyahu that Hamas is stealing aid. The Israeli publication Haaretz published an article discussing how the IDF tried to debunk starvation claims but ended up proving the existence of forced starvation policies. The subtitle reads, “In an attempt to debunk Hamas’ claims of Israel-induced starvation in the Gaza Strip, the IDF pointed out that some who died of malnutrition had preexisting medical conditions. Experts say the information provided by the military actually proves that the population is indeed suffering from hunger.” The article points out that it is no surprise that children with preexisting conditions would die first, but that only proves how dire the situation is.
The New York Times even ignored its own reporting in failing to debunk Netanyahu’s claim. On July 26th, a Times piece was published titled, “No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say.” From the article, it reads,
“But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.
In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.”
“An internal U.S. government analysis came to a similar conclusion, Reuters reported on Friday. It found no evidence of systematic Hamas theft of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, the report said.”
So Hamas, according to Israel’s own military, is not stealing food. It’s bizarre even to have to clarify that, as common sense could explain that an entire population of 2 million people does not starve due to isolated incidents of militants taking aid for themselves.
While we watch as liberals, technocrats, and organizations slowly cover their ass in the coming months, don’t forget their silence because they knew what was going on all along. How many pieces have been denied from being published in The New York Times because the author didn’t condemn Hamas enough or mention October 7th? How many different writers were silenced for trying to portray the reality of the genocide as Biden’s State Department spewed non-answers at unprincipled journalists who sat there uncritically? How many harsh words were corrected in the name of both-sides-ism?
In the face of pleas from thousands of aid workers, doctors, and international scholars, the Times refused to publish the word ‘genocide’ for 647 days. It wasn’t an accident either. A leaked internal document obtained by The Intercept showed that journalists were restricted from using the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in their articles. Finally, on July 15th, they allowed Omer Bartov, a former IDF member and Brown University genocide scholar, to publish an opinion piece declaring that Israel is committing a genocide. But that piece was really just a correction to Bartov’s previous opinion piece from November 10th, 2023, where he said Israel was not committing a genocide even though, by that point, it should’ve been obvious based on statements by Israeli leaders and the carpet bombing of civilian buildings.
That claim couldn’t stand on its own for more than a week, however, as staff columnist Bret Stephens, a zealous defender of Israel, wrote a sloppy, rambling response article. It was titled, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” which vomits all of the same lies already told, not necessarily to debunk Bartov’s claims, but to justify Israel’s actions. To paraphrase, it features delusional arguments such as, “it’s not deadly enough to be a genocide,” “Israel could commit genocide if they want to but chose not to,” “the IDF didn’t shoot that many people,” “it’s just a war, don’t be dramatic,” “but Palestinians want to genocide Israelis,” “a lot of civilians died in WWII so therefore it’s just a war,” “I’ve personally never heard of Israeli leaders explicitly say they will target civilians,” “just a few bad apples shot dozens of kids in the head with sniper rifle bullets,” “Hamas uses civilians as human shields,” “civilians died when America fought ISIS and nobody protested,” and the most disingenuous one of all, “you’re anti-semitic if you call this genocide.”
So even now, they don’t care about the objective truth when their own op-ed writers are spewing blatant lies that contradict their own reporting. It isn’t an accident. A dossier compiled by the activist media publication The New York War Crimes shows how deep the ideological Zionist roots of the writing staff go. Many writers are former Israeli military or defense members or dual citizens of Israel, while rarely will they feature a Palestinian writer. Bret Stephens is employed by a Zionist advocacy group, and he serves as the editor-in-chief at SAPIR, a Zionist journal, which is in direct conflict with the Times’ ethical guidelines that require disclosure of such affiliations.
It is a conscious choice that this publication, like many others, does a slow rollout of coverage critical of Israel. It’s a choice that serves to protect Zionism by portraying it as a noble cause with some radical actors rather than a morally rotten ethnosupremacist ideology aimed at instituting settler colonialism. The only logical conclusion of any such ideology is to ethnically cleanse and genocide the native population, should they refuse to accept the conditions imposed on them. The more liberal or pragmatic supporter watching a genocide happen in the name of that ideology may decide that it is more suitable for the long term to condemn the starvation, which is horrible optics for the international community. They might calculate that the genocide can continue just fine without starvation, that bombing is easier to defend rhetorically, and provides more detached suffering to prevent outrage. But even that thought process is being pushed to the brink, forcing many Democrats to come out and condemn Israel even though they were complicit in their 22-month silence. On July 28th, two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, both announced their conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. The dam is beginning to crack, and lies will not work anymore.
I will close with the beautifully heart-crushing words from Anas Jamal Al-Sharif, one of five Al-Jazeera journalists who were murdered in an Israeli drone strike last week. The attack was unquestionably targeted to silence reporters showing the reality of this genocide on the ground. Anas wrote this message in June as a last goodbye, knowing that he was at extreme risk doing his essential work of reporting on the ground in Gaza.
This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.
Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabalia refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (Al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
I entrust you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.
I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed.
I entrust you with my dear son Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission.
I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.
I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend—patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith.
I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty. If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting.
O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it. Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.
—Anas Jamal Al-Sharif 🕊️ 6.4.2025