Major broadcaster uses decade-old photo of starving Yemeni child for article about hunger in Gaza

Additionally, it was captioned: "In Gaza, parents ration one pot of rice among six children. Aid stalls as the death toll from hunger mounts in Palestine amid Israel’s forced starvation."

The body of the article, which did not include the photograph, was made up of interviews with Palestinians declaring the IPC’s recent declaration of famine in Gaza City to be “too little, too late”.

However, while the image used for the social media post did show a starving child, it has emerged that it was taken in 2016 in a hospital in Hodeida, Yemen, during the famine brought about by the long-running civil war there.

A Reuters article from September of that year, seen by the JC, features exactly the same picture under the headline “Starving children of Yemen”.

In that piece, it was accompanied by the caption: “A malnourished boy lies on a bed at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Houdieda, Yemen" and was credited to photographer Abduljabbar Zeyad.

TRT’s post is still online and no public correction has yet been issued.

It comes after a number of photos of apparently malnourished children in Gaza were published by international media, only for it to be revealed subsequently that the children in question suffered from pre-existing medical conditions.

Just last week, the Daily Mirror devoted its front page to an image of the visibly emaciated Karim Muammar, whom the paper described as being treated for “severe malnutrition in hospital at Khan Yunis, Gaza”.

"Desperate Karim, three, is skin and bone from malnutrition,” it added.

His picture appeared under the headline “Stop starving Gaza’s kids”, directing readers to a piece interviewing several Holocaust survivors expressing their concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

However, the paper did not report that Karim suffers from Fanconi syndrome, a rare genetic disorder which makes it harder for him to absorb nutrients even on a healthy diet.

This information was disclosed in the caption of the photo on the site of picture agency Getty, which distributed the image, but was not included in the Mirror report.

The JC has contacted TRT World for comment.