Musab Al-Debs has lost 75 percent of his body weight. The 14-year-old reportedly weighed 40 kilograms (88 pounds) before he was injured in an airstrike; now he weighs no more than 10 kilograms. In photos published by Reuters, the sharpness of his jaw bone juts out of his face. "My son is being eaten away every day," his mother Shahinaz told SHMS News Agency. "I swear to God. There is no food, no milk, no fruit, no dairy. We don't even have bread. The children of Gaza are withering like flowers every day, and no one asks about them."
According to the Associated Press, an Israeli airstrike hit near the Al-Debs family's tent in May, causing Musab to suffer a head wound that required removing a portion of his skull. He went from Indonesia Hospital in northern Gaza to the surgical ward of Al-Shifa Hospital. "For about two months, he has been at Shifa Hospital, largely paralyzed, only partly conscious and severely malnourished because the facility no longer has the supplies to feed him, said Dr. Jamal Salha," the AP reported. He cannot improve because the hospital does not have any nutrient formula suitable for tube feeding.
Because Musab's mother begs—in the SHMS article and elsewhere—for someone to get her son out of Gaza for treatment before he dies of starvation and injury, there are photos of him. Musab's photo has been included in many of the articles published by news organizations to show starvation in Gaza. According to a Free Press article by Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, titled "They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems," the inclusion of Musab Al-Debs in these slideshows is proof of an underhanded tactic by the media.
"An investigation by the Free Press reveals that at least a dozen other viral images of starvation in Gaza also lacked important context: The subjects of those photos have significant health problems," the Free Press article reads. Its authors use 12 Palestinians to, in theory, hold mainstream news organizations accountable. These other news organizations, they claim, aren't giving readers the full context when they show pictures of the people in Gaza who are starving. There's more to it than starvation; these Palestinians are also ill and injured. Some have medical problems—esophageal conditions, cerebral palsy—that existed before Israel started bombing hospitals and massacring people at aid distribution sites.
In other hands, this set of facts could make an effective point and lay bare a moral horror: that people (including many children) who are already ill are being starved to death. Indeed, viewed from an only slightly different angle, Reingold and Lukyanova's reporting meticulously documents the suffering caused by Israel's undisguised campaign of destruction against Gaza's medical system. But in these people's injuries and illnesses, Reingold and Lukyanova see not evidence of broader moral failings by the Israeli government and its enablers, but proof of a media conspiracy to conjure concern for those who don't deserve it. They take the suffering of these Palestinian people as evidence that the mainstream media is intentionally misleading its audience to support the Palestinian cause.
As my colleague Brandy Jensen wrote a couple of weeks ago about the backlash to a New York Times article on the topic, "The fact that some starving children in Gaza are also chronically ill becomes, through twisted logic, proof that there are no starving children in Gaza." The Times, in issuing a statement and updating its original story to include that a starving child also had pre-existing health conditions, laid the groundwork for a story like this one, which takes the same premise with more malicious intent. The Free Press is building out a conspiracy in this article. They are cherry-picking examples of children who are hurt and starving in an attempt to convince people that actually, the media is the problem—not the restriction of aid, not Israel's vicious attacks on a civilian population, not the people being shot as they try to get supplies. The issue is that readers aren't being given the proper context.
The Free Press is not subtle about this work. "Some of [these children] might have been sick or worse even if there was no war," Reingold and Lukyanova write. "In 2022, about 50 Gazans under the age of 20 died from malnutrition, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health." But in the publication's characterization of Musab Al-Debs specifically, you can see how smarmy and sinister this kind of coverage really is. Here's an excerpt:
The 14-year-old boy was featured in the same CNN story as another child "suffering from malnourishment." The original caption didn't mention that last May, he sustained a traumatic head injury amid what SHMS News Agency, a Gaza-based outlet, called "an Israeli shell" explosion.
"My son was injured in the head," his mother explained. "Part of his skull was removed."
It is absurd to treat Al-Debs's injuries as a separate incident from his starving. The very mechanisms that deprive him of nutrients are the ones that injured him in the first place: He was grievously wounded by an Israeli bomb, then taken to a hospital that has been repeatedly attacked by the IDF, where he is unable to receive proper care because the Israeli government has blocked medical supplies from entering Gaza, and cannot receive adequate nutrition because they have blocked that, too.
The Free Press and other motivated outlets have to focus on allegations of media bias because they cannot defend the behaviors of Israel. You cannot argue, based on any reality, that the state of Israel is not committing genocide. Though the Free Press has certainly tried, what they are doing here is also cruel. What its journalists are arguing and trying to get away with is a malicious sleight of hand that attempts to discredit the people suffering and the outlets reporting on that suffering. It's a subtler, more cowardly form of evil, but evil nonetheless.
Take another egregious part of Reingold and Lukyanova's section on Musab Al-Debs, where they cherry-pick the quote from his mother. Here's the translated quote in its entirety from SHMS News, emphasis mine:
"My son was shot in the head, and part of his skull was removed. Musab is suffering from severe ulcers and acute malnutrition because of the closure of the crossings and the siege of Gaza. There is no medical care, nothing. I swear to God I will lose him if we don't travel abroad for treatment."
Shahinaz Al-Debs knows that her son is dying both because he is malnourished and because he is receiving inadequate medical care for an injury caused by Israel's bombs. This is not good enough for the Free Press. What the Free Press seems to want is, as Mohammed El-Kurd has previously written, a "perfect victim," the unattainable example of the Palestinian who merits sufficient trust to be granted their own narrative, to be recognized as a human being rather than the result of a tragedy that requires no further action.
Even this hypothetical perfect starving child with no health issues would obviously not be enough for the Free Press. There is no hope for journalists who see these images and volunteer to take on the responsibility of a claims processor at Aetna. You cannot reason with these people, who look at a child whose mother is begging for help, and determine that because an Israeli airstrike hospitalized him first, he isn't really starving. In writing about 17-year-old Atef Abu Khater, the Free Press emphasizes that he has a "mysterious illness" and that he hasn't been the same "after burns on his toe and hand at a soup kitchen." Reingold and Lukyanova do not bother to mention how he got those burns, or the cascade of Israeli policy decisions and human rights abuses that force Gaza's hungry children to line up at soup kitchens in the first place. Nor do they mention that on Aug. 2, Khater reportedly died of starvation. It is impossible to defend the humanity of Palestinians to people who clearly do not regard them as having any.
The closing section of the Free Press article devotes itself to questioning whether anyone in Gaza is even starving at all, or whether reports of starvation might be Hamas propaganda—an embarrassing, hateful choice that Reingold and Lukyanova only undermine in their conclusion. Their piece ends with quotes from Tzvika Mor, the father of an Israeli hostage, who worries that his son might be starving in captivity. It seems likely, if only because nearly everyone in Gaza is starving. Israel is restricting the food. That's the point.
