Another Image that Lied

On 23 July, the tragic image of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq shook the world. Headlines told a story of a boy being forcibly starved in a Gaza famine. My research quickly exposed that story as a lie. Muhammad had cerebral palsy, had been sick since birth, and his siblings were healthy.

Barely a week later, legacy media played the same trick again – this time with a young girl called Maryam.

We are told Maryam was evidence of Gaza’s ‘catastrophic hunger crisis’:

Embarrassingly, the Irish Independent even used her image as a defence against the earlier fake – suggesting Muhammad was an isolated case, but Maryam was proof of mass starvation. The LA Times quoted doctors claiming tests showed ‘no underlying medical condition’ and that her condition was solely the result of hunger and malnutrition.

All of this was false.

Cropping out the Truth

Coverage of Maryam’s tragic case involved deliberate omission. She has siblings – all apparently healthy. In some of the photos, they were present on the same mattress. Editors cropped them out, because their health would expose the lie.

If this were widespread famine, her siblings and mother would also show signs of starvation. They do not.

In one photo you can even see the legs of a healthy sibling just inside the frame:

And in this image, from the same photoshoot, we can clearly see the young, healthy and well fed boy:

Every honest journalist would know that if the family is healthy, then the child has an underlying illness. They chose to cut that part of the story away.

The Medical Reality

A whistleblower at an NGO inside Gaza, unhappy at the global deception, shared evidence of Maryam’s medical file from Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

Both to protect the whistleblower, as well as respect the privacy of a tragically sick child, I am not publishing the report in full (journalists who are interested can contact me). But I will publish just a couple of relevant sections:

The report is clear: Maryam became sick 18 months ago, long before famine was even discussed. She suffers from intestinal malabsorption. Her body cannot properly absorb nutrients. She was given food, therapeutic milk, and medication – but she could not absorb them.

The malnutrition is a consequence – not a cause. Her current treatment confirms this:

• Intravenous fluids
• Potassium chloride
• High levels of Vitamin A
• Broad spectrum antibiotics
• Ready-to-use therapeutic foods
• Special fortified, therapeutic milk.

Does this sound like a place of mass starvation and famine? This is a treatment protocol for complicated severe malnutrition. It is specialist medical care, not famine relief. She is not being starved. She is being treated.

So when Diana Magnay at Sky News recently told viewers that Maryam is suffering from severe malnutrition – and suggests that ‘starvation is a characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat’ – Sky News is spreading a fake news story. Maryam’s problem is malabsorption – nothing to do with a lack of food.

There should be a concerted effort to get these children to safety for treatment. Instead of helping her get the specialist care she truly needs, global media turned her into a famine mascot. That does not just exploit her – it endangers her.

Once bitten, twice – bite me again

What makes this latest famine hoax even more astonishing is that it comes barely a week after the last one collapsed. In that case, international outlets took the image of a child with healthy siblings, a boy suffering from a tragic but very specific medical condition (CP) and presented him as evidence of mass starvation.

The lie was so blatant that even the New York Times and other major outlets were forced to roll back their claims once the truth emerged.

Incredibly, the same terrorist-supporting journalist – Ahmed al-Arini – appears to have broken both stories (1, 2).

This is not sloppy journalism. It is not an innocent mistake. It is the same trick, deployed twice in as many weeks, by the same actors. That is proof that legacy media are not being misled – they are knowingly promoting a lie.

So what is the truth?

We live in an age where too many journalists have become activists, media standards have collapsed, and editors are chasing clicks with sensationalism over accuracy. When the story can be shaped to fit a preferred narrative, fact-checking is abandoned. The presence of 1000s of journalists in the UK who once worked for foreign Islamist outfits makes a bad situation even worse.

So if there is no famine, if starvation is not widespread, then what is really happening?

The honest answer ‘its complicated’ won’t suffice. Not when we are facing a coordinated media campaign that promotes a modern-day blood libel. So I am going to generalise.

For context – in the UK today there are currently about 86000 children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions.

To support the ‘famine’ narrative, The recent Sky News said hospitals are ‘overwhelmed’ with cases. Yes – so are the UK hospitals and we are not even in a war-zone.  There were over 3000 recorded child deaths in the UK in 2023. Over 400 people die in the UK each year from malnutrition.

Now imagine a desperate conflict here. A journalist could walk into an NHS ward, take images of desperately ill children, and spin them as evidence of deliberate starvation by our enemy. Technically nothing about the picture would be false, but the framing and narrative would be a lie. That is exactly what is happening now in Gaza.

Take the latest BBC coverage – a headline that feeds the false famine narrative, suggesting starvation-related death. A child’s image used to create additional emotional pull. Only buried deep in the text does the article admit it is likely the woman suffered from a ‘serious congenital disease’. This is not journalism. This is manipulation.

Yes – war is awful. During conflict, wherever possible, very sick people should be evacuated so they can access the treatment they need. The tragic reality is that many will still not survive.

But tragedy is no excuse for fraud. We do not want media to wave an Israeli flag. We just ask that they stop acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, and return to the most basic duty of journalism – we want them to tell the truth.

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