For more than 21 months, much of the international media danced around the truth about Israel’s war on Gaza. The old newsroom cliche – “if it bleeds, it leads” – seemed to apply, for Western media newsrooms, more to Ukraine than Gaza. When Palestinian civilians were bombed in their homes, when entire families were buried under rubble, coverage came slowly, cautiously and often buried in “both sides” framing.
But when the images of starving Palestinian children began to emerge – haunting faces, skeletal limbs, vacant stares – something shifted. The photographs were too visceral, too undeniable. Western audiences were confronted with what the siege of Gaza truly means. And for once, the media’s gatekeepers could not entirely look away.
The world’s attention, however, alerted Israel, and a new “hasbara” operation was deployed. Hasbara means “explaining”, but in practice, it’s about erasing. With Tel Aviv’s guidance, pro-Israel media operatives set out to “debunk” the evidence of famine. The method was fully Orwellian: Don’t just contest the facts. Contest the eyes that see them.
We were told there is no starvation in Gaza. Never mind that Israeli ministers had publicly vowed to block food, fuel and medicine. Never mind that trucks were stopped for months, sometimes vandalised by Israeli settlers in broad daylight.
Israeli officials, speaking in polished English to Western media, assured the public this was all a Hamas fabrication, as though Hamas had somehow managed to trick aid agencies, foreign doctors and every journalist in Gaza into staging hunger.
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The propaganda machine thought it had struck gold with one photograph. A New York Times image showed a skeletal boy, Mohammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. Israeli intelligence sources whispered to friendly outlets: He’s not starving. He has a medical condition. As if that somehow makes his horrific condition acceptable.
The Times went ahead and added an editor’s note to “correct” the record.
That’s how hasbara works – not by persuading people but by exhausting them. By turning every fact into a dispute, every image into a row. By pushing editors to “balance” a photograph of an emaciated child with a government news release denying he is hungry.
Imagine a weather report where one source says, “It’s raining,” and another insists, “No, it’s sunny,” while everyone stands outside, soaked from the downpour. Gaza is that drenched truth, and yet much of the Western news media still feels obliged to quote the weatherman in Tel Aviv.
Every honest report is met with a barrage of emails, phone calls and social media smears, all designed to create just enough doubt to make editors pull back.
But the claim “He’s not starving. He’s just sick” is not an exoneration. It’s an admission.
A child with a pre-existing medical condition who is brought to the point of looking like a skeleton means he has been deprived not only of the nutrition he needs, but of the medical care. This is forced starvation and medicide side by side.
Palestinian journalists inside Gaza, the only ones reporting since Israel banned all foreign media and killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists, are starving alongside the people they report on. In a rare joint statement, the BBC, AFP and Associated Press warned that their own staff members face “the same dire circumstances as those they are covering”.
At the height of the outrage over these photos last week, Israel allowed in a trickle of aid – some airdrops and 30 to 50 trucks a day when the United Nations says 500 to 600 are needed. Some trucks never arrived, blocked by Jewish extremists.
Meanwhile, a parallel mechanism for aid distribution has been funnelled through Israeli-approved American contractors, which purposefully create dangerous and chaotic conditions that lead to daily killings of aid seekers. Crowds of starving Palestinians gather, only to be shot at by Israeli soldiers.
And still, the denials persist. The official line is that this is not starvation. It’s something else – undefined but definitely not a war crime.
The world has seen famine before – in Ethiopia, in Somalia, in Yemen, in South Sudan. The photographs from Gaza belong in the same category. The difference is that here, a powerful state causing the starvation is actively trying to convince us that our own eyes are lying to us.
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The goal is not to convince the public that there is no hunger but to plant enough doubt to paralyse outrage. If the facts can be made murky, the pressure on Israel diminishes. This is why every newsroom that avoids the word “starvation” becomes an unwitting accomplice.
Starvation in Gaza is not collateral damage. It is an instrument of war, measurable in calories denied, trucks blocked and fields destroyed.
Israel’s strategy depends on controlling the lens as well as the border. It goes as far as prohibiting journalists allowed on airplanes airdropping food from filming the devastation below.
For a brief moment, the publication of those photos of starving Palestinians broke through the wall of propaganda, prompting minimal concessions. But the siege continues, the hunger deepens and the mass killing expands. Now the Israeli government has decided to launch another ground offensive to occupy Gaza City, and with it, the genocide will only get worse.
History will record the famine in Gaza. It will remember the prices of flour and sugar, the names of children and the aid trucks turned back. And it will remember how the world allowed itself to be told, in the middle of a downpour, that the sky was clear.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.