On Monday, the Las Angeles Times reported:
The Israeli government is defending a top military officer who dismissed images of starving Palestinians as “fake” over the weekend, despite President Trump stating Monday that he believes the pictures are real.
The rupture comes amid growing international pressure on Israel over dire circumstances in the Palestinian enclave, and as two Israeli human rights groups, in a first, characterized the Israeli operation in Gaza as a genocide.
In recent days, photographs and videos of desperate Palestinians crowding aid stations and of emaciated children have spread across the globe. Even so, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Sunday that “there is no starvation in Gaza.”
And on Sunday, during a press tour of a small area of the Gaza Strip, Effie Defrin, a commanding officer and Israel Defense Forces spokesman, told reporters that visuals emerging from Gaza were “breaking our hearts.”
“But most of it is fake, fake distributed by Hamas,” Defrin said. “It’s a campaign. Unfortunately, some of the Israeli media, including some of the international media, is distributing this information and those false pictures, and creating an image of starvation which doesn’t exist.”
Much of the mainstream media, too often weak in the face of Israel's propaganda machine, has often been complicit in amplifying these lies, failing to challenge the narrative with the rigour it demands. As the United Nations, aid agencies, and even starving Hamas prisoners bear witness to this engineered famine, the world must confront the moral bankruptcy of those who excuse Israel’s actions while children waste away in front of our eyes.
Israel’s campaign hinges on a cruel distortion: that images of emaciated Palestinian children, like one-year-old Muhammad Zakariya al-Matouq, reflect pre-existing medical conditions rather than widespread starvation. Right-wing propagandists in New Zealand have eagerly echoed this disgusting lie. Rachel Stewart, in a venomous X post on 1 August 2025, criticised Stuff for supposedly using a photo of a “malnourished” Gazan child, falsely claiming the New York Times retracted its use due to the child’s cerebral palsy.
Juliet Moses, Cameron Slater, and Ani O’Brien have similarly been cited for pushing this narrative, alleging media exaggerate starvation to vilify Israel. These claims, rooted in selective truths, ignore the undeniable: Muhammad’s condition worsened due to Israel’s blockade, which denies food and medical supplies, as confirmed by his doctor. This tactic, highlighting medical issues to dismiss intentional starvation, is a hallmark of Israel’s “Pallywood” propaganda, designed to dehumanise Palestinians and deflect blame.
The mainstream media’s susceptibility to this disinformation is a scandal in itself. Outlets like the New York Times and BBC have faced criticism for initially omitting medical context in stories about children like Muhammad, but their clarifications, such as the Times’ note on 23 July 2025, affirm that starvation compounds these conditions. However, when propagandists like Moses and Slater seize on these oversights, they distort the narrative to suggest no famine exists, a claim contradicted by overwhelming documented evidence.
On 23 July, PBS reported:
Experts say Gaza is at risk of famine because of Israel’s blockade and offensive, launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The head of the World Health Organization said Gaza is “witnessing a deadly surge” in malnutrition and related diseases, and that a “large proportion” of its roughly 2 million people are starving.
Israel says it allows enough aid into the territory and faults delivery efforts by U.N. agencies, which say they are hindered by Israeli restrictions and the breakdown of security.
...
In an open letter, 115 organizations, including major international aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, said they were watching their own colleagues, as well as the Palestinians they serve, “waste away.”
The letter blamed Israeli restrictions and “massacres” at aid distribution points. Witnesses, health officials and the U.N. human rights office say Israeli forces have repeatedly fired on crowds seeking aid, killing more than 1,000 people. Israel says its forces have only fired warning shots and that the death toll is exaggerated.
The Israeli government’s “restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death,” the letter said.
The World Health Organisation reported 63 malnutrition deaths in July alone, and one in five children under five facing acute malnutrition. But the true picture will be much worse. The media’s failure to consistently challenge Israel's disinformation about the cause of these deaths and mass starvation, often due to fear of being labelled antisemitic, allows these disgusting lies to fester, undermining the truth of Gaza’s man-made famine.
Israel’s blockade, intensified from March through to July 2025, slashed aid to a trickle, compared to the 500–600 trucks required each and every day, as per UN estimates. The Gaza Health Ministry reports 127 hunger-related deaths since October 2023, including 85 children. Of course, given the difficulties in locating people who have starved to death in a "war" zone, this will be an underestimation. Even Hamas prisoners, held in dire conditions, are starving, not because of Hamas’s actions, but because Israel’s restrictions ensure there’s not enough food to go around.
The claim that Hamas diverts aid lacks evidence; USAID and UN reviews, who have no reason to counter the Israeli narrative other than to tell the truth, found no systematic theft. Yet, Israeli officials like David Mencer and Benjamin Netanyahu shamelessly blame Hamas and the UN, accusing them of engineering shortages while ignoring Israel’s role in blocking aid. This is a grotesque inversion of responsibility: Israel, not Hamas, is starving both civilians and prisoners. They are doing this with the help of many western leaders, including Donald Trump, whose propaganda concerning the genocide is often just as dishonest as Israel's. The atrocities we are witnessing would end tomorrow if Western leaders truly wanted them to.
The disinformation campaign also targets the United Nations and surrounding countries, falsely claiming they fail to distribute aid. Israel’s ambassador Danny Danon accused UN aid chief Tom Fletcher of colluding with Hamas, offering no evidence at all to back up his false claims. COGAT, Israel’s aid coordination body, claimed 4,500 trucks entered since May 2025, but the UN notes these are insufficient and face military restrictions, rendering distribution nearly impossible.
Airdrops, lauded by Israel and the US as major humanitarian gestures, are a farcical distraction. UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini called them “expensive, inefficient, and dangerous,” with many landing in the sea or without parachutes, killing desperate civilians. The US and Israel’s Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), supposedly replacing UN systems, has been a complete disaster, with over 1,000 Palestinians killed at its militarised aid sites so far. Many of these civilians are being murdered by Western soldiers who then return to their home countries without any consequences.
The United States and Israel's theatrics of providing aid mask the reality that aid volumes are a fraction of what’s required. The World Food Programme warns of famine-like conditions for 470,000 people, making a joke of the promise that this type of genocide would never happen again.
The right-wing's lack of action to curb this crisis, enabled by a disinformation campaign and amplified by discredited muckrakers like Slater, Moses, O’Brien, and Stewart, isn't just dishonest, it’s complicity in genocide. The blood of these starved children is on their hands. By parroting Israel’s lies, they obscure a crisis where women and children die daily from hunger, their bodies “eating themselves” in a slow, cruel death, as Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan described. The UN’s Michael Fakhri calls this “the fastest starvation campaign in modern history,” preventable yet enabled by international inaction and impunity.
Two Israeli human rights groups, B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, have labelled it a genocide, citing deliberate starvation tactics, which is clearly another war crime perpetrated by Israel and its accomplices. The mainstream media must reject their propaganda, amplify the voices of the besieged and starving, and hold Israel accountable. New Zealanders, too, must see through the lies of local propagandists and demand justice for Gaza’s rightful inhabitants. Because if we don't stop this type of genocide, aided and abetted by right-wing propagandists, it will continue into other countries, perhaps even your own.
