In the past week, a heart-wrenching image of a desperately thin Gazan child has been splashed on the front pages of newspapers worldwide and all over social media. But what none of them have told you, says David Collier, is that the child has a serious genetic disorder – and his brother is well. Here’s an excerpt from David’s viral thread on X.
This is not the face of famine. It is the face of a medically vulnerable child whose tragic situation was hijacked and weaponised. Exposing the truth behind the viral Gaza ‘famine’ image of Mohammed Al-Matouq.
You’ve seen the photo. A starving Gazan child. Bones showing. Headline after headline claiming it was proof of famine. It ran on the front page of the Daily Express on July 23rd. Then Sky News, CNN, NYT, BBC, Guardian, and others picked it up. But they left something out.
Let me just start with other images the media chose not to use. Photographs of Mohammed with his three year-old brother Joud. Both mother and brother are healthy and fed. Any honest journalist should have immediately questioned – and reported – what we were actually seeing.
Mohammed suffers from cerebral palsy, has hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder. He has required nutritional supplements since birth. A medical report issued in Gaza in May 2025 confirms all of this. This wasn’t disclosed in a single major outlet.
I watched @bbcnews lie on screen It interviewed the mother. She referenced a history of physiotherapy. The signs were there. The BBC ignored them. Instead it reported the curved spine was from famine. A healthy child starving fits the narrative. A child with CP doesn’t.
And what of the father? The media said Mohammed had no father, because he had been killed by the Israelis when out “looking for food”. Pushing the hunger narrative even more. This example from @nytimes.
Turns out he was killed on October 28th 2024 (don’t worry – receipts in article below). He was killed in a targeted strike on ‘al Qassabeeb’ street in Jabaliya. The Israelis lost seven soldiers in that area in that week.
This is what ‘al Qassabeeb’ street in Jabaliya looked like that week. This is a Hamas video showing terrorists targeting the IDF in the same street that Mohammed’s father was apparently out “looking for food”.
This is what ‘al Qassabeeb’ street in Jabaliya looked like that week.
This is a Hamas video showing terrorists targeting the IDF in the same street that Mohammed’s father was apparently out ‘looking for food.' 8/13 pic.twitter.com/vYDN7o1vj2
The UN and NGOs also played a disturbing role in creating a crisis. Rather than helping deliver aid, they imposed impossible logistical demands, stalling food deliveries and wanting Hamas control over distribution. Why? Because Hamas needs control to keep ruling Gaza.
This is not to say there is not a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It’s hard to know the truth. But spreading misleading images of an ill child as the face of a ‘famine’ is no way to build confidence that what we’re being told are the facts.
Well said. This is classic Pallywood.
Note that the adults here aren’t thin, emaciated.
The superb Honest Reporting site has led the exposure of this misinformation war for years.
Strongly recommended, please share widely. https://honestreporting.com/another-photo-another-lie/
I’ve seen another instance where the child has been being treated in Italy for the last two months (taken there by Israel) and yet another where the supposedly starving Gazan is a Yazidi girl fleeing from Isis in 2017.
It’s just relentless and yet they have the bloody nerve to lecture us about misinformation.
You’re right, it’s very prevalent. There’s been many images taken from stories years ago in Syria and Yemen attributed to this Israel – Gaza conflict, pure misinformation to perpetuate the all-important narrative to paint Israel as being the evil villains and they’ve all been found out and debunked. It makes me laugh because whatever happened to the accusation/commonly held belief by antisemites that Jews control the media? That particular allegation doesn’t exactly stack up, does it?
I think this is the boy you’re referring to;
”This is what a modern blood libel looks like:
A sick child. A hijacked photo. A lie that spreads faster than truth.
His name is Osama al-Raqab. He has cystic fibrosis, a serious genetic illness.
He’s been in Italy receiving treatment since June 12. Israel enabled his medical transfer from Gaza.
But that didn’t stop media outlets from weaponizing his image NOT to tell his story, but in order to smear Israel.
Because when it comes to Israel, facts are optional.
I think it’s especially callous and disgraceful that the terrorists and their supporters are hijacking and weaponizing the suffering of these poor children who are legitimately ill in order to push their anti-Israel/perma-victimhood agenda and the Israel-hating muppets in the West just lap it up because then they feel justified in their Jew-hate which was already there in the first place;
”FABRICATED SUFFERING IS NOT EVIDENCE – IT’S PROPAGANDA! This video of a newborn having a seizure, taken from a nursing page on FaceBook, is pushed by media outlets as a starving baby in Gaza.
If there are starving babies in Gaza, why do they fake the evidence?”
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.” Zuheir Mohsen, Senior PLO leader, 1977 This is the second part in the deep dive into the conception of Palestine, inc: the KGB, the PLO, Stalin, the UN, the origin of anti-Zionism/antisemitism, Operation SIG and more. It also explains how fake stories such as the one above are used to manipulate the masses. An excerpt; ”Lying is effective for deception; getting others to spread the lie serves as a force multiplier. Another tactic of deception employed by the KGB to weaken or destroy Israel is by exploiting the “Useful Idiot.” This term, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, refers to recruiting a useful pawn, one who is not aware of being manipulated, to disseminate one’s propaganda.The device works well with young, impressionable youth looking for… Read more »
The disgusting propaganda using this child is unforgivable but entirely expected, however the way the father’s death was dismissed is also wrong.
He was killed in that street but he may not have been looking for food there; he may have been simply using that street to get somewhere else. If you are going to criticise Hamas, don’t fall into the trap of using this sort of narrative
Sforzesca
8 months ago
Anything to deflect the fact that Israel/IDF have killed at least 50,000 in Gaza/West Bank since October 2023, mostly civilian women and children. But It doesn’t really matter to most on here though does it? I mean the kids will only grow up to become terrorists and the women well, no more children – some of you have even said kill the lot of them.
A life is a life and none more precious than that of a child – but it’s all the fault of Hamas.
I don’t know how you sleep at night, I really don’t..
Thankfully, and despite Incessant Israeli propaganda since 1948 if not before, most of the world is waking up to what has been happening.
Anybody got any actual coherent moral arguments to justify the continuing murder of the innocents/genocide.
Come up with some moral arguments to justify terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli members of the public since 1948, and the cynical use of the people of Gaza as human shields, and then perhaps you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. This whole situation cannot be boiled down to one side being good and the other side being evil. Capitulating to the demands of terrorists is like scratching an insect bite. It gives temporary relief, but then the discomfort returns, worse than before.
OK. Been living in an open air prison since 1948 and being routinely murdered ever since. Hamas arose in 1987 a s a result..
Do some research instead of parroting MSM/Israeli bullshit.
Where do you get number from, the Hamas press office (also known as the BBC)?
Other sources give around 30000 dead nearly all hamas fighters.
If they handed the hostages back in good health straight away (or even better not murdered 1400 people on October 7th) this unpleasantness would have been much less unpleasant.
Not all the hostages have been released and there is reliable evidence many of them have been grievously abused and a number killed.
”Every phase of Israel’s war against Hamas has been met with blatant double standards. The laws of war that apply after a nation is attacked have been distorted or ignored. Casualty figures provided by Hamas have been accepted and repeated as if they were verified truth. Israel has faced demands that no other democracy would tolerate, including calls to stop a war it did not start.
These double standards must be called out and challenged.
One clear example is the international media’s fixation on the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio. This question is not asked of other nations at war. Yet in Israel’s case, the narrative is shaped around statistics that originate from Hamas, a designated terrorist group. Hamas gains an advantage by labeling nearly every casualty as a civilian and every 14 to 18-year-old fighter as a child. This tactic is part of their broader strategy to win the information war and delegitimize Israel’s right to defend itself.”
I fail to see why so many on DS align with Israel abusing, killing and starving the general population of Gaza who haven’t got the power to release the hostages.
Only 4 against – at the time of writing – and still not even the semblance of a semi coherent response.
This site must be dying.
Come on Will, even you can think of something?
We’re still waiting for your evidence of 50,000 people having been killed in Gaza. Stop changing the subject and provide it, along with proof that 30 or so people are being killed at aid distribution sites almost every day which is what the MSM claim.
Remember the images from Ethiopia in the 80s, or pictures of the holocaust. All the pitiful walking skeletons in their last stages of life. The footage from Gaza is nothing like that. They are thin, but they are not staving. The BBC feeds you the story, but expects you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes. If they had evidence of healthy people staving I’m certain they would show it. The only pictures they have are of children who are sick with something else. Unfortunately the only evidence here is that the BBC is rife with anti-Semitism, and has become the mouth piece for Hamas
Well the no-brainer is to look at the parents, who are invariably well nourished, if not positively overweight. But I don’t think any amount of contradictory evidence will suffice when you’re dealing with people who have an innate hatred of Israel and/or Jews. They’d rather believe (mis)information from actual terrorists ( who have an obvious agenda and huge reliance on pushing propaganda ) and their sympathizers than anyone in or associated with Israel. The only people being starved in Gaza are the hostages; ”Some facts and figures about the “famine” in Gaza: 1. Before the war, an average of 73 trucks carrying food and aid entered the Gaza Strip daily; today, around 80 are allowed in. 2. Since the start of the war, Israel has transferred over 70,000 trucks and approximately 1.5 million tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza—a figure likely unprecedented in the history of warfare. 3. The overwhelming majority of the aid is looted by Hamas. 4. Almost all images of “famine” from Gaza (if not all) depict grotesquely thin children next to healthy-looking parents. There’s no such thing as “selective starvation.” 5. The UN refuses to distribute more than 900 trucks’ worth of food, which were inspected… Read more »
I wonder if young people might be more susceptible to these images due to lack of exposure in their lifetime – when was the last large-scale televised famine? I remember blanket coverage in the ’80s, ’90s and possibly 2000s, but not much more recently. Those images never showed adults who were fatter than me (which is saying something) holding emaciated children. And if they had, in those days, instead of simply believing the narrative we’d have asked some serious questions about the morality of parents who fed themselves rather than their children.
Matt Dalby
8 months ago
When I first saw the picture, and before reading the article, my first thought was that the picture had been taken in Yemen where there’s a humanitarian crisis created by the Houthis (another genocidal Iranian backed Islamist group) that the woke MSM were claiming was taken in Gaza.
CAMERA, Campaign for Accurate Middle Eastern Reporting and Analysis does an excellent job of exposing the lies that Hamas peddles and their useful idiots in the MSM repeat. In one instance Hamas claimed that video taken in 2004 showed casualties from Israeli airstrikes in 2018, in response to Hamas firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli cities.
Other than saying that CAMERA are part of a global Zionist conspiracy how to the tiny of number of anti Israel trolls who comment here respond to their evidence?
RTSC
8 months ago
Since I ignore the BBC and most MSM, I haven’t seen that picture before.
If I had, my first reaction would have been “What kind of mother starves a child, whilst remaining obviously well-fed herself?”
Unfortunately about 85% of the population has no critical thinking skills whatsoever and are easily manipulated by propaganda, as we witnessed very recently during the Covid Tyranny.
Well it seems that a lot of people like to be selective as to which propaganda they believe and that which they dismiss
Infinite Peace
8 months ago
Of course we cannot condone the BBC’s lies. There are bound to be lies on both sides; that’s human nature, sadly. However, I have firsthand information from Egypt that Palestinian civilians in Gaza are being starved and mistreated.
It’s also worth checking out these two links, unless you think these are also lies:
I still watch, read and listen to mainstream news reporting, and I certainly don’t take statements from the Israeli military at face value. The trouble is the media’s very, very clear pattern of deliberate lies: the reporters cannot be so dense as to miss the obvious clues that things are not as they are presented, and I credit them with better linguistic skills than would be the case if their consistent anti-Israel phrasing were accidental. I’m sure people are undernourished in Gaza. Everything looks horrible there. But I’m also almost as sure that that undernourishment is not because of Israel, but rather because the area is run by terrorists and violent gangs who don’t prioritise feeding their citizens. It’s always possible that the doctor’s story is 100% true, in which case I hope to see a string of very harsh prosecutions in the very near future. I have however become extremely wary of claims of such demonic behaviour, especially when the claims are being made against the side who aren’t proud terrorists. Even if he believes what he’s saying, he didn’t see the attacks himself to know who was responsible, and in any case people who work – or want… Read more »
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Well said. This is classic Pallywood.
Note that the adults here aren’t thin, emaciated.
The superb Honest Reporting site has led the exposure of this misinformation war for years.
Strongly recommended, please share widely.
https://honestreporting.com/another-photo-another-lie/
I’ve seen another instance where the child has been being treated in Italy for the last two months (taken there by Israel) and yet another where the supposedly starving Gazan is a Yazidi girl fleeing from Isis in 2017.
It’s just relentless and yet they have the bloody nerve to lecture us about misinformation.
You’re right, it’s very prevalent. There’s been many images taken from stories years ago in Syria and Yemen attributed to this Israel – Gaza conflict, pure misinformation to perpetuate the all-important narrative to paint Israel as being the evil villains and they’ve all been found out and debunked. It makes me laugh because whatever happened to the accusation/commonly held belief by antisemites that Jews control the media? That particular allegation doesn’t exactly stack up, does it?
I think this is the boy you’re referring to;
”This is what a modern blood libel looks like:
A sick child. A hijacked photo. A lie that spreads faster than truth.
His name is Osama al-Raqab. He has cystic fibrosis, a serious genetic illness.
He’s been in Italy receiving treatment since June 12. Israel enabled his medical transfer from Gaza.
But that didn’t stop media outlets from weaponizing his image NOT to tell his story, but in order to smear Israel.
Because when it comes to Israel, facts are optional.
Hate always finds a headline.”
https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/1949781081751765052
Yes that’s the one, thank you, sometimes you wonder if you imagine stuff!
Last Tuesday night the BBC shamelessly exploited another poor boy with a muscle wasting disease to emphasise their point.
I think it’s especially callous and disgraceful that the terrorists and their supporters are hijacking and weaponizing the suffering of these poor children who are legitimately ill in order to push their anti-Israel/perma-victimhood agenda and the Israel-hating muppets in the West just lap it up because then they feel justified in their Jew-hate which was already there in the first place;
”FABRICATED SUFFERING IS NOT EVIDENCE – IT’S PROPAGANDA!
This video of a newborn having a seizure, taken from a nursing page on FaceBook, is pushed by media outlets as a starving baby in Gaza.
If there are starving babies in Gaza, why do they fake the evidence?”
https://x.com/GAZAWOOD1/status/1948458326267711815
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.” Zuheir Mohsen, Senior PLO leader, 1977 This is the second part in the deep dive into the conception of Palestine, inc: the KGB, the PLO, Stalin, the UN, the origin of anti-Zionism/antisemitism, Operation SIG and more. It also explains how fake stories such as the one above are used to manipulate the masses. An excerpt; ”Lying is effective for deception; getting others to spread the lie serves as a force multiplier. Another tactic of deception employed by the KGB to weaken or destroy Israel is by exploiting the “Useful Idiot.” This term, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, refers to recruiting a useful pawn, one who is not aware of being manipulated, to disseminate one’s propaganda.The device works well with young, impressionable youth looking for… Read more »
The disgusting propaganda using this child is unforgivable but entirely expected, however the way the father’s death was dismissed is also wrong.
He was killed in that street but he may not have been looking for food there; he may have been simply using that street to get somewhere else. If you are going to criticise Hamas, don’t fall into the trap of using this sort of narrative
Anything to deflect the fact that Israel/IDF have killed at least 50,000 in Gaza/West Bank since October 2023, mostly civilian women and children. But It doesn’t really matter to most on here though does it? I mean the kids will only grow up to become terrorists and the women well, no more children – some of you have even said kill the lot of them.
A life is a life and none more precious than that of a child – but it’s all the fault of Hamas.
I don’t know how you sleep at night, I really don’t..
Thankfully, and despite Incessant Israeli propaganda since 1948 if not before, most of the world is waking up to what has been happening.
Anybody got any actual coherent moral arguments to justify the continuing murder of the innocents/genocide.
Come up with some moral arguments to justify terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli members of the public since 1948, and the cynical use of the people of Gaza as human shields, and then perhaps you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. This whole situation cannot be boiled down to one side being good and the other side being evil. Capitulating to the demands of terrorists is like scratching an insect bite. It gives temporary relief, but then the discomfort returns, worse than before.
OK. Been living in an open air prison since 1948 and being routinely murdered ever since. Hamas arose in 1987 a s a result..
Do some research instead of parroting MSM/Israeli bullshit.
Where do you get number from, the Hamas press office (also known as the BBC)?
Other sources give around 30000 dead nearly all hamas fighters.
If they handed the hostages back in good health straight away (or even better not murdered 1400 people on October 7th) this unpleasantness would have been much less unpleasant.
Not all the hostages have been released and there is reliable evidence many of them have been grievously abused and a number killed.
So, not much sympathy TB brutally H.
So, Hamas just gives them back and Israel stops? Lol.
Don’t you have the slightest conception of what has been happening for the last 75 years?
A good post here by John Spencer;
”Every phase of Israel’s war against Hamas has been met with blatant double standards. The laws of war that apply after a nation is attacked have been distorted or ignored. Casualty figures provided by Hamas have been accepted and repeated as if they were verified truth. Israel has faced demands that no other democracy would tolerate, including calls to stop a war it did not start.
These double standards must be called out and challenged.
One clear example is the international media’s fixation on the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio. This question is not asked of other nations at war. Yet in Israel’s case, the narrative is shaped around statistics that originate from Hamas, a designated terrorist group. Hamas gains an advantage by labeling nearly every casualty as a civilian and every 14 to 18-year-old fighter as a child. This tactic is part of their broader strategy to win the information war and delegitimize Israel’s right to defend itself.”
https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1949291360424689703
Are all those images of mass graves and almost total destruction of Gaza settlements fake?
I fail to see why so many on DS align with Israel abusing, killing and starving the general population of Gaza who haven’t got the power to release the hostages.
Maybe they should try releasing the hostages they took while they were slaughtering youngsters at a music festival.
Only 4 against – at the time of writing – and still not even the semblance of a semi coherent response.
This site must be dying.
Come on Will, even you can think of something?
We’re still waiting for your evidence of 50,000 people having been killed in Gaza. Stop changing the subject and provide it, along with proof that 30 or so people are being killed at aid distribution sites almost every day which is what the MSM claim.
Remember the images from Ethiopia in the 80s, or pictures of the holocaust. All the pitiful walking skeletons in their last stages of life. The footage from Gaza is nothing like that. They are thin, but they are not staving. The BBC feeds you the story, but expects you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes. If they had evidence of healthy people staving I’m certain they would show it. The only pictures they have are of children who are sick with something else. Unfortunately the only evidence here is that the BBC is rife with anti-Semitism, and has become the mouth piece for Hamas
Any conception of what 50,000 plus actually dead people look like?
About 25,000 more than have been killed in Gaza, about half of which were Hamas fighters.
Well the no-brainer is to look at the parents, who are invariably well nourished, if not positively overweight. But I don’t think any amount of contradictory evidence will suffice when you’re dealing with people who have an innate hatred of Israel and/or Jews. They’d rather believe (mis)information from actual terrorists ( who have an obvious agenda and huge reliance on pushing propaganda ) and their sympathizers than anyone in or associated with Israel. The only people being starved in Gaza are the hostages; ”Some facts and figures about the “famine” in Gaza: 1. Before the war, an average of 73 trucks carrying food and aid entered the Gaza Strip daily; today, around 80 are allowed in. 2. Since the start of the war, Israel has transferred over 70,000 trucks and approximately 1.5 million tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza—a figure likely unprecedented in the history of warfare. 3. The overwhelming majority of the aid is looted by Hamas. 4. Almost all images of “famine” from Gaza (if not all) depict grotesquely thin children next to healthy-looking parents. There’s no such thing as “selective starvation.” 5. The UN refuses to distribute more than 900 trucks’ worth of food, which were inspected… Read more »
I wonder if young people might be more susceptible to these images due to lack of exposure in their lifetime – when was the last large-scale televised famine? I remember blanket coverage in the ’80s, ’90s and possibly 2000s, but not much more recently. Those images never showed adults who were fatter than me (which is saying something) holding emaciated children. And if they had, in those days, instead of simply believing the narrative we’d have asked some serious questions about the morality of parents who fed themselves rather than their children.
When I first saw the picture, and before reading the article, my first thought was that the picture had been taken in Yemen where there’s a humanitarian crisis created by the Houthis (another genocidal Iranian backed Islamist group) that the woke MSM were claiming was taken in Gaza.
CAMERA, Campaign for Accurate Middle Eastern Reporting and Analysis does an excellent job of exposing the lies that Hamas peddles and their useful idiots in the MSM repeat. In one instance Hamas claimed that video taken in 2004 showed casualties from Israeli airstrikes in 2018, in response to Hamas firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli cities.
Other than saying that CAMERA are part of a global Zionist conspiracy how to the tiny of number of anti Israel trolls who comment here respond to their evidence?
Since I ignore the BBC and most MSM, I haven’t seen that picture before.
If I had, my first reaction would have been “What kind of mother starves a child, whilst remaining obviously well-fed herself?”
Unfortunately about 85% of the population has no critical thinking skills whatsoever and are easily manipulated by propaganda, as we witnessed very recently during the Covid Tyranny.
Well it seems that a lot of people like to be selective as to which propaganda they believe and that which they dismiss
Of course we cannot condone the BBC’s lies. There are bound to be lies on both sides; that’s human nature, sadly. However, I have firsthand information from Egypt that Palestinian civilians in Gaza are being starved and mistreated.
It’s also worth checking out these two links, unless you think these are also lies:
https://news.sky.com/story/almost-like-a-game-of-target-practice-british-surgeon-says-idf-shooting-gazans-at-aid-points-13401434
https://news.sky.com/story/bob-geldof-accuses-israeli-authorities-of-lying-about-starvation-in-gaza-13402178
The Free Speech Union’s motto is: listen to the other side. Don’t we have to listen to both sides in this horrendous conflict?
I still watch, read and listen to mainstream news reporting, and I certainly don’t take statements from the Israeli military at face value. The trouble is the media’s very, very clear pattern of deliberate lies: the reporters cannot be so dense as to miss the obvious clues that things are not as they are presented, and I credit them with better linguistic skills than would be the case if their consistent anti-Israel phrasing were accidental. I’m sure people are undernourished in Gaza. Everything looks horrible there. But I’m also almost as sure that that undernourishment is not because of Israel, but rather because the area is run by terrorists and violent gangs who don’t prioritise feeding their citizens. It’s always possible that the doctor’s story is 100% true, in which case I hope to see a string of very harsh prosecutions in the very near future. I have however become extremely wary of claims of such demonic behaviour, especially when the claims are being made against the side who aren’t proud terrorists. Even if he believes what he’s saying, he didn’t see the attacks himself to know who was responsible, and in any case people who work – or want… Read more »