For more than 21 months, much of the international media danced around the truth about Israel\u2019s war on Gaza. The old newsroom cliche \u2013 \u201cif it bleeds, it leads\u201d \u2013 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 \u201cboth sides\u201d framing.<\/p>\n
But when the images of starving Palestinian children began to emerge \u2013 haunting faces, skeletal limbs, vacant stares \u2013 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\u2019s gatekeepers could not entirely look away.<\/p>\n
The world\u2019s attention, however, alerted Israel, and a new \u201chasbara\u201d operation was deployed. Hasbara means \u201cexplaining\u201d, but in practice, it\u2019s about erasing. With Tel Aviv\u2019s guidance, pro-Israel media operatives set out to \u201cdebunk\u201d the evidence of famine. The method was fully Orwellian: Don\u2019t just contest the facts. Contest the eyes that see them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not starving. He has a medical condition. As if that somehow makes his horrific condition acceptable.<\/p>\n
The Times went ahead and added an editor\u2019s note to \u201ccorrect\u201d the record.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how hasbara works \u2013 not by persuading people but by exhausting them. By turning every fact into a dispute, every image into a row. By pushing editors to \u201cbalance\u201d a photograph of an emaciated child with a government news release denying he is hungry.<\/p>\n
Imagine a weather report where one source says, \u201cIt\u2019s raining,\u201d and another insists, \u201cNo, it\u2019s sunny,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the claim \u201cHe\u2019s not starving. He\u2019s just sick\u201d is not an exoneration. It\u2019s an admission.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe same dire circumstances as those they are covering\u201d.<\/p>\n
At the height of the outrage over these photos last week, Israel allowed in a trickle of aid \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And still, the denials persist. The official line is that this is not starvation. It\u2019s something else \u2013 undefined but definitely not a war crime.<\/p>\n
The world has seen famine before \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cstarvation\u201d becomes an unwitting accomplice.<\/p>\n
Starvation in Gaza is not collateral damage. It is an instrument of war, measurable in calories denied, trucks blocked and fields destroyed.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial stance.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For more than 21 months, much of the international media danced around the truth about Israel\u2019s war on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[105,837,7424,839,4434,7670,1814,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-331635","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-israel-palestine-conflict","11":"tag-middle-east","12":"tag-nutrition","13":"tag-opinions","14":"tag-palestine","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115001210000981124","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}