Online Screenshot/JTA[Missing Credit]
“An allegedly armless child, whose picture is reportedly displayed on President Reagan’s desk as a symbol of the suffering in Lebanon, turns out to be boy, not a girl as alleged, and has both arms intact.
“According to the caption accompanying the United Press International (UPI) photo, distributed throughout the world, it was a picture of a baby girl swathed in bandages after both arms had been blown off by a misdirected Israeli bomb. The child was seen held in the arms of a nurse.”
At the time UPI was a major international news agency. The picture and caption were also distributed globally by the Associated Press.
The photo and caption then appeared in, among other publications, the Washington Post and New York Times. Reagan saw it in the Post and ordered the photo to be placed on his desk in the Oval Office.
These were the days before the internet so it took time for Israel to be aware that this photo had been published in Washington and placed by Reagan on his desk. Israel then tracked down the child in Lebanon and the nurse, as well as the child’s mother, confirmed the infant’s arms had not been blown off and said they had never suggested otherwise to the photographer.
UPI acknowledged they’d been fooled by PLO propagandists. The Washington Post belatedly ran a correction and Reagan removed the photo from his desk. The New York Times – no surprise here - refused to run a proper correction.
There is a decades-long history of media being fooled by anti-Israel propagandists. I remember my fellow journalists being taken in when I was working as a news reporter in the Middle East. You can look up my article “Jeningrad” from the second Palestinian intifada.
So we should be very cautious about the reports coming out of Gaza now – photos like this from the cover of an Italian magazine which turns out to be an older photo of a child who had a genetic illness, and who has thankfully since received medical treatment and is now considerably better.
Online screenshot/Il Fatto Quotidiano
Indeed many of the worst “starvation” photos you are seeing out of Gaza have been proved to be of children with congenital or other diseases.
As analyst Saul Sadka said recently on X: “There’s a special place in hell for the editors and journalists who took Hamas’ photos of children with congenital conditions and broadcast them to their already radicalized audiences with the message ‘Look what the Jews did’.”
That is not to say there is not hardship and hunger in Gaza – every war has hardship and hunger and the situation in Gaza is a tragedy.
But even Hamas’ Gaza Health Ministry’s claims about starvation in Gaza are dwarfed by those in other ongoing wars and conflict situations, for example those in Haiti, Sudan and Ethiopia where tens of thousands of children have died of malnutrition.
We don’t hear much about the extensive involvement of foreign powers (including Western and Arab states) supplying weapons to these conflicts – Google it if you don’t know.
What about this report from earlier this week by Reuters, published on the evening of July 25 - headlined “At least 652 children died from malnutrition in Nigeria in the last six months”.
That is 10 times more than even the Hamas health ministry are claiming for Gaza.
Online screenshot/Reuters[Missing Credit]
So why aren’t we hearing about this from Western leaders? Do black lives not matter after all?
The answer, of course, is that all lives matter, including lives in Africa and the Middle East – or for that matter people who go hungry sleeping on the streets of British and American cities.
Yes, Gaza and Israel and the West Bank need a better future, including plenty of food. Yes, the war in Gaza needs to end, and hostages need to be released.
The question is whether Western politicians reacting to the media repeating Hamas propaganda designed to keep Hamas in power, is the best way to achieve that better future for Gaza.
Tom Gross is a journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner. The German newspaper Die Welt described Gross as "A liberal in the fight against left-wing liberal hypocrisy". Gross was the first journalist sympathetic to Israel to be favorably profiled in Saudi Arabia’s main newspaper, at a time when Saudi outreach to Israel was in its infancy in 2019.
