People are starving in Gaza. They are starving because the Israeli government is not allowing enough food to enter, and because what food becomes sporadically available can be claimed only by those willing to enter the death traps engineered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American and Israeli-backed private food distribution system.
A recent report from the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, including data up to July 25, “indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.” Because this crisis is so widespread, it will necessarily impact wide swathes of the population. There will be Palestinian men, women, and children who struggle to meet their minimal requirements for nutrition. This will happen to elderly diabetics and pregnant women and asthmatic teenagers. The frail bodies of children with conditions that impede muscle development will become frailer. That hunger will come for those already struggling to thrive makes the situation more horrifying, not less, provided you are a person who has not systematically shriveled your own moral instincts down to nothing.
If you do suffer from that kind of moral emaciation, though, there would seem to be more to all this. 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. At least, that was the thinking behind the backlash to a July 24 front-page story in the New York Times about Gaza’s famine crisis, which included, among other cases, that of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, an 18-month-old suffering from severe malnutrition. Within days, pro-Israel independent journalist David Collier published details from a medical report issued in May 2025 which notes that the child has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, in addition to hypoxemia and a suspected genetic disorder. The story of this child, Collier concludes, is “being weaponised to build false global narratives. In this case, the lie is of a Gaza gripped by mass famine and children dying from hunger.”
This has been going on long enough, and recursively enough, that you know what happened next. There followed accusations from former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett that the Times was perpetrating “a blood libel,” and, according to the Jerusalem Post, a request from the Israeli Consulate General in New York that the Times amend their story. It is rare for the New York Times to comply with such requests, but they did so on Tuesday evening. The paper issued a statement announcing that they “have since learned new information […] and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems” to give “readers a greater understanding of his situation.”
The updated paragraph in the article reads:
Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development. But his health deteriorated rapidly in recent months as it became increasingly difficult to find food and medical care, and the medical clinic that treated him said he suffers from severe malnutrition.
If the editors thought this would satisfy their right-wing critics, they were, of course, mistaken. Hedge fund manager and aspiring tennis pro Bill Ackman is already suggesting that the state of Israel should bring a libel suit against the newspaper. Adam Rubenstein, a former Times employee and protege of Bari Weiss, took this as “an admission of a remarkable deception,” and proof that “the malnutrition is not caused by a lack of food, but by a pre-existing condition.” This is not the case, of course, as the actual update makes clear. That this child is suffering from a lack of adequate medical care in addition to a lack of food is hardly exculpatory, nor does this change what is happening to the other children in the report, or what doctors returning from Gaza have witnessed with their own eyes. But the substance of the actual update, like the substance of the initial report, was never really what mattered about this.
The point of all this outrage is to confound and obscure a horror that cannot otherwise be denied, and an update from the newspaper would in that sense be enough for anyone looking to quell a stirring of revulsion or guilt in whatever part of themselves remains tenuously connected to the project of being human. This is something the Times has always been counted on to sell to its readers: the opportunity to feel righteously informed while avoiding, for a little longer, the truth of what is happening. It is enough for them to keep thinking that sickness lives only in the body, and not in the soul.
