We are not speaking from a framework of shared humanity
The picture above,1 by freelance photographer Ahmeed al-Arini, was published by many news outlets starting on 23 July 2025 and quickly became a symbol of Israel's deliberate mass starvation of the population of Gaza. I write symbol because, independently from the picture, by that date a consensus had already formed that the situation in Gaza was untenable.
- On 21 July, 28 countries issued a joint declaration which stated: "The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food."
- On 22 July, the Secretary-General of the UN decried the "horrow show in Gaza" in his remarks to the Security Council.
- On 23 July, 109 aid agencies and NGOs published a letter denouncing that the UN-led humanitarian system was prevented from functioning and that even aid workers on the ground in Gaza were wasting away. This was followed by the head of the WHO stating: "I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation, and it’s man-made, and that’s very clear and this is because of [the] blockade.”
But symbols are much stronger than words and the "Madonna with starving child in a bin bag nappy" picture is a very powerful image indeed, possibly on a par with the most iconic war photographs. For that reason, a macabre, coordinated campaign to discredit this and similar images, on the ground that the children involved had preexisting health conditions, soon got underway.
Natasha Lennard poignantly captures the horror of such attempts.
Natasha Lennard: Bari Weiss’s Free Press Wants You to Know Some Kids Being Starved by Israel Were Already Sick
What killed Anne Frank?
The Nazis killed Anne Frank.
To suggest that any other cause was primary in her vastly premature death is tantamount to vile Holocaust denialism — which is why Holocaust denialists do indeed point out that Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
This is precisely the logic that Israel’s apologists in the media have deployed in recent days when it comes to the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza. The right-wing Free Press published a story on Sunday, framed as an investigative exposé, revealing that at least 12 of the Palestinian children featured in viral images depicting the state of Israel-induced famine were not only starving, but … were also sick.
... If a person can, after nearly two years of genocidal onslaught, witness the scenes and testimonies from Gaza — of which the images of these malnourished children are just a tiny slice — and find the main problem is that not enough people know that some of the most vulnerable in Israel’s genocide have preexisting health conditions, then we are not speaking from a framework of shared humanity.
... The fact that the Free Press story’s authors and publishers do not see that their claim is the modern-day equivalent to suggesting that Frank primarily died of typhus makes all too clear that they do not see Palestinians as fully human. It is a supremacist, eugenicist lens that is beneath contempt, yes, but also beneath debate.
The article's warranted moral outrage, though, overshadows another sinister aspect. The Free Press story is just one instance of a massive pro-Israel campaign of disinformation and intimidation. In a related example, The Washington Free Beacon's falsely accused the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognised organisation that assesses the severity of food insecurity, of having changed one of its criteria to classify a famine in its July report. The accusations were amplified by a number of pro-Israel websites and, on 22 August, by the Israel Foreign Ministry despite them having been debunked at least two days earlier. Similarly misleading is the discredited letter by a group of British Peers, including several distinguished lawyers and Jewish Peers, to the UK Attorney General claiming that the UK recognition of Palestine "would be contrary to international law."
Then there are the sinister doxing websites, such as Canary Mission and Knowbdsinisrael, and the troll farms, all financed by the Israeli government or by pro-Israel, mostly American, organizations. The most emblematic case is possibly that of the New York Post and the doxing group StopAntisemitism harassing the children influencer Ms Rachel after she launched a fundraiser for the children in Gaza and other war zones!
As always, the cossacks work for the czar. If the czar, in this case the Israeli government, were not genocidal the cossacks would not engage in genocide denial and obfuscation. Let us not lose sight of that!
After all, the most horrific incarnation of this disinformation effort is the Israeli government's systematic killing of more that 197 journalists in Gaza since October 2023. That this is intentional, hence a war crime, rather than accidental is attested by Israel's prior death threats, subsequently carried out, against the journalists' families, by the smears, by the double-tap lethal attacks caught live on camera, by the refusal to allow foreign journalists into Gaza.
Yet, despite all these macabre efforts, it is impossible not to know.
We know, from the admission of a former US State Department spokesperson, that Israel has repeatedly sabotaged truce deals that Hamas had accepted.
We know, from the Israeli military’s own data, that over 80% of the people that Israel has killed in Gaza are civilians.
We know that Israel has a long standing policy of restricting food supplies to Gaza. The policy was unsettlingly summed up in 2006 by a former Israeli government adviser as: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
We know that Israel has been running a scientific starvation campaign, because the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) calculated the minimum caloric needs of the population of Gaza already in 2008. According to figures by the same COGAT the amount of aid reaching Gaza between March and July 2025 was dramatically below that.
We know that this, together with the shooting of thousands of desperate civilians queuing for food, the destruction of hospitals and schools, the methodical flattening of whole areas of Gaza, amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity. At some point, engaging in a debate on whether it has attained the level of genocide is just a distraction.
We know that the only possible conclusion one can draw is that the Israeli government, as well as a plurality of Israeli Jews, do not see Palestinians as fully human.
We, who swore to remember, who read to our children Number the Stars and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit as soon as they were barely able to understand, who warned them never to forget... We know where this leads...
Primo Levi, author's preface to If This is a Man
"Many people -- many nations -- can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when this unspoken dogma becomes the premise of a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal."