Seeing Is Not Always Believing

"The political tide has turned against Israel"

"[Largely the result of] images of starving Gazan children have[ing] ricocheted across the globe."

Professor Daniel W. Drezner, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, tufts University

 

"[Too many journalists have been uncritically citing the Hamas-operated Gaza Health Ministry on conditions in Gaza]. The result is a narrative that masks its source and misleads the public about who is to blame."

"The default frame -- that of U.S., Israeli, and GHF [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] culpability -- is repeated in headlines both explicitly and implicitly, even when the reality is unresolved or points elsewhere."

"This pattern of laundering narratives, particularly from unvetted or partisan sources, appears widespread in Western media. [The result has been] a distorted portrayal of humanitarian conditions in Gaza, misleading policy-makers, misinforming the public, and exploiting vulnerable individuals for political gain." 

The Network Contagion Research Institute / Rutgers University Social Perception Lab report 

Hidayat Al-Motawaq holds her 18-month-old son, Mohammad Al-Motawaq, in their tent in the Gaza Strip on Aug. 3.  Anas Baba/NPR 

In the wake of the Israel Defense Forces' invasion of Gaza directly following on the Hamas terrorist group's October 7, 2023 atrocities carried out by thousands of Hamas operatives along with those of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine when Israeli girls and women were raped, mutilated and murdered, and kibbutzim raided, their inhabitants killed, leaving 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilian, butchered, and another 250 taken hostage, the Palestinian public relations operation went into full overdrive. 

 

Heart-rending stories and photographs of gaunt, skeletal, vacant-eyed Palestinian children were distributed by Hamas to Western media who unhesitatingly took them up and gave them wide, front-page publication, setting the wider stage for a global popular revulsion of the nation defending its population from marauding masses of terrorists, transformed into the merciless aggressor, placing the Palestinian population which fully supported Hamas in Gaza and its categorical aspirations for the destruction of Israel, as the victims in an unjust war.

 

Mainstream Western media unquestioningly published the photographic 'evidence' of Palestinian children starving in Gaza, resulting from Israel's conflict with Palestinian terrorists. The very same terrorists known for installing themselves along with their weapons caches, rocket launchers, militia operations headquarters within the densely populated areas for the purpose of shielding themselves from Israeli responses, offering up the Palestinian civilian population in their stead. Those civilians who are wounded or killed as collateral damage in the conflict with Hamas become the useful propaganda fodder for Hamas.

 

And even knowing this to be the Hamas modus operandi, as despicable as it is, the resulting propaganda is published without verification or suspicion with respect to its source, in a free-for-all legacy media assault on Israel as the aggressor once again victimizing Palestinians. The international community, influenced by what they read and hear and see in those damning photographs turn against a nation desperate to defend itself from its implacable death-dealing enemies. The photographs of pathetic starving children in Gaza that fire up anger against Israel, bear examination.

 

The Free Press did investigate a dozen of those photographs of 'starving children' revealing that each of them "were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action". Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova pointed out that a photograph of an emaciated Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub alMatouq forced the New York Times to admit the child "had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development", when the falsity of Hamas-generated images of him as a typical starving child was revealed.

 

The Associated Press, CNN and other U.S. major news outlets published photographs of children portrayed as starving, when they were in actual fact, suffering from medical conditions ranging from cystic fibrosis to cerebral palsy, to genetic wasting conditions. This reflected a pattern of Western press publishing utterly false allegations on stories and photographs supplied to them by a terrorist group. And it is not that the corrupt practices of Hamas propaganda was unknown to these Western media enablers.

 

The Wall Street Journal had published an analysis of October 7's mastermind Yahya Sinwar's correspondence revealing his purpose in using Palestinian Gazans' suffering as a weapon against Israel. "He's shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas", wrote two journalists for the Journal in analyzing his messages to negotiators and Hamas members. Sinwar, they wrote, also stated to an Italian interviewer: "We make the headlines only with blood ... No blood, no news".

 

The myth of Palestinians suffering under famine has captured coverage in the West, all the more so, through photographs of starving children. The inconvenient detail that the children portrayed suffer not from starvation but from chronic medical conditions is hardly of concern to Hamas, but it should be to the uncritical Western media that appear to favour Hamas and in contrast, disfavour Israel. That Hamas was the instigator of the conflict and deliberately sacrifices its own population of civilian Palestinians seems less newsworthy to the Western press than presenting reality. 

 

Samah Matar poses for a photo with her sons Yousef, 6, in her arms, and Amir, 4, who suffer from malnutrition and cerebral palsy, at a U.N.-run school in Gaza City, Saturday, July 26, 2025. In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

 

The United Nations also clearly favours Hamas. Its refusal to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in distributing food aid to Palestinians has meant that hundreds of trucks loaded with food have been virtually abandoned by the UN, the food left to rot. Those trucks that did enter Gaza saw many of them commandeered by armed Hamas terrorists and taken to Hamas depots where they were unloaded and stored for the use of Hamas, not distributed to Palestinian civilians as they were meant to be. Yet Western media has yet to ask of Hamas why it has secured humanitarian aid in their own warehouses, off limits to Palestinians, while Hamas claims starvation stalks Gaza and kills its children.

"[NCRI addresses the issue of the falsely-imputing photographs alleging] multiple cases of potential journalistic malpractice by major Western media outlets in their portrayal of alleged famine in Gaza." 

"[NCRI] uncovered clear evidence that the depicted individuals had long-standing, confounding medical conditions such as cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, or chronic illness [that were generally revealed in the original Arab-language sources of the images but omitted when republished in the West]."

Network Contagion Research Institute 

No aid has reached people in Gaza, a UN aid official says, two days after the Israeli government lifted an 11-week-old blockade. The Israeli military said five aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday and 93 on Tuesday, but supplies haven't been distributed, say local officials. Still from video