Five days after it published a story titled “Gazans are dying of starvation,” The New York Times added an editor’s note on Tuesday stating that “this article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition.”
“After publication of the article, the Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems,” the editor’s note states.
The Times credits the photographer Saher Alghorra for the visuals in its article. The media watchdog HonestReporting noted that Alghorra appeared to justify Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, writing that day that “the Palestinian resistance in Gaza” had fired “thousands of missiles toward the occupied territories in response to settlers’ attacks and incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
After the images of the boy circulated widely online, his mother told CNN that he suffers from a “muscle disorder.”
“You ran a front page picture of an emaciated 18-month-old boy to prove that Gazans were starving, when it was known at the time to everyone on social media that the cause of the boy’s condition was a congenital illness rather than a lack of food,” stated David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
“You now claim to have ‘learned’ that the boy had a ‘pre-existing health condition.’ No one believes that. Given your despicable track record, it’s obvious that you just ran with the most dramatic photo to make your false assertion,” he wrote. “How do you sleep at night?”
“Shorter: We are so instinctively against Israel that we put a picture of a child on the front page of our global newspaper without verifying any facts about him first,” AIPAC stated.
