We posted a picture of a child of malnutrition in Gaza. It has caused an impact worldwide – and created controversy Elizabeth Ribban
forIn April and mid -July this year, more than 20,000 children in Gaza were accepted to a hospital for acute malnutrition, 3,000 of whom were severe malnutrition, according to the classification of integrated food security (IPC), a global initiative whose members include United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Food Program, in addition to NGOS.
During this period, and in the weeks that followed, the Guardian published many pictures of hungry children, of whom at least 20 were displayed in a meager condition. (It works to work on a editorial symbol that gives special protection for children, and publishing about matters that may parasify their well -being only when there is a strong public interest to do so.) But one image, which appeared on the main page of the site on July 23 and the front of the printed version the next day, was pushed to the fierce seriousness.
The picture was strong and exciting: a 18 -month -old boy, Mohamed Zakaria Ayoub Al -Matq, gun between his mother’s arms; The naked skeleton, diapers, black plastic bag. This image, as well as others of the same child, was widely published by the main news organizations.
David Coleer, an independent journalist, and the enemy of anti -Semitism, accused the media who published pictures of this “to pressure a lie about starvation.” He said A medical report stated in May 2025 that he saw that the boy was suffering from cerebral palsy. This was not the face of starvation, Coller wrote in Blogpost On July 27, but a child “needs specialized medical supplements from birth.”
“What we can see from [unpublished] The pictures are that the mother of Muhammad and his older brother appear in good health and does not suffer from any kind of hunger that will be necessary to cause the thinness that Muhammad suffered.
A reader call me criticize the picture directly as “fake”. Another said: “This poor child suffers. But is he hungry?
It seems that it does not have a solution that readers want to know the “real reason” in everything they see. But its availability is not always clear. War is always complicated by chaotic and individual conditions.
Israel prevents foreign journalists from entering Gaza, which means that they depend on local journalists, including photographers, who work in difficult and dangerous conditions. The Guardian receives about 1000 photos per day from Gaza, which it provides or through the main photo agencies. The photos of Muhammad came through Getty Images from the Turkish Anadolu Agency.
In the aftermath of the accusations, Anadolu was published article Susan Marouf, a doctor who treats the boy at the patient’s friends hospital in Gaza City, said that the doctors there had diagnosed him in the previous month with “moderate narratives on the top of the rear health problems, including complications from the brain and muscle nigability”, but these issues “did not greatly affect his weight” until the food hospital became. Since then, he has developed severe malnutrition.
Separately, Anadolu distributed a picture of Muhammad’s bed showing a picture of him before losing weight. Muhammad’s mother said that he decreased from 9 kg to 6 kg in recent weeks.
The Guardian was not aware until after the publication of the photos (the first was in a photo exhibition on July 22) that the boy was suffering from other medical conditions. Should they ask? The relevant editors told me here told me that seeing his lost framework was not unusually normal; “They constantly saw pictures of months.”
In the hunger crisis, they point out that experts bear witness to how children and those who suffer from current medical conditions are among the most at risk. According to the WHO, among the 63 deaths associated with the malnutrition recorded in July, 24 children were under the age of five. This is 38 %, when it constitutes less than 15 % of the total population of Gaza.
Children with growth disorders can have special nutritional needs. A pediatrician, who was talking to me about the background, said that the diagnosis was a challenge in settings without reaching early identity tools, which means that with cerebral palsy, for example, the final diagnosis is not sometimes until the age of two.
The editors say that the indication of the current health issues of Muhammad has been included if they were known – and the illustrations of the photos have been modified – but they consider that the pictures are still in place, saying that the sick child who is starving is “does not deserve our interest more than any other child”, as previous reports that are breastfed by malnutrition with the emergence of basic nutritional conditions. In other words, the face of malnutrition is often weak.
For my part, I agree that the lost information was related to a complete reading of the image. But the guardian, as some claim, relied on this image alone to clarify the reporting of what IPC called days later (although the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejects the evaluation) famine “reveals”. And if we realize that it is the most vulnerable to the danger who are affected by the selection of food and health services, then spreading this image of real suffering did not behave, in my view, to deception.