Since July 19, when Hamas launched a campaign charging Israel with inflicting widespread starvation in the Gaza Strip, the attentive Western press corps has displayed an insatiable appetite for coverage of severe hunger in the war-torn coastal territory.
So great was the desire and passion to cover hunger in the Hamas-run territory that some media outlets completely jettisoned the bedrock journalistic value to “seek truth and report it,” unable to resist the temptation of falsely casting emaciated children suffering from severe underlying medical disorders as representative of starvation victims.
The New York Times, for instance, infamously featured one of these tragic but misrepresented cases, an article accompanied by a shocking above-the-fold, four-column photograph, on the front page of its July 25 edition, “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing.’” The paper later was compelled to backtrack with an editor’s note acknowledging that toddler, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, suffers from “pre-existing health problems.”
But that laser-sharp focus on undeniable hunger in the Gaza Strip remarkably dissipated in recent days when shocking new footage documenting emaciation emerged from the Hamas-controlled territory: horrific clips of Israeli hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, deliberately starved and tortured by terror groups, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, respectively.
There was no front-page The New York Times article and photo for David and Braslavski. Instead, the paper of record relegated the two Israeli hostages, who unlike little Muhammad, do not suffer from any underlying medical conditions, to page 10. Even there, in that place of relative obscurity, the print edition did not deem a photograph necessary. Notably, too, The Times’ page-10 story omitted one of the most shocking elements of Hamas’ video of David, that the emaciated and severely abused captive was digging what he said was his own grave.
Buried coverage of the horrific hostage starvation videos is the latest, most blatant and jarring example of mainstream media erasing the hostages.
(Read the rest of this Aug. 7 Op-Ed by Tamar Sternthal, CAMERA director of media research and analysis and director of CAMERA’s Israel office, at JNS. For the Arabic version of this Op-Ed, see CAMERA Arabic.)