On July 23, the head of Gaza’s Health Ministry shared welcome news about a young Palestinian, Osama al-Raqab, who had been suffering from acute malnutrition. The five-year-old boy is now in good condition after being transferred to an Italian hospital for treatment.
Osama al-Raqab’s improved condition after treatment in Italy.
Unsurprisingly, the Hamas–affiliated health official, Munir al-Boursh, didn’t share that Israel had helped coordinate the transfer. Indeed, the main point of his social media post was to accuse Israel of lying. “[T]he Israeli occupation media attempted to mislead public opinion” by claiming Osama had comorbidities which contributed to his severe health, he insisted, whereas in fact Osama was just like other children in Gaza.
It’s not certain which “occupation media” he was referring to. Reports that Osama suffered from cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder associated with nutritional difficulties, had previously appeared in NBC News and the Associated Press. But Al-Boursh’s post may have been spurred by a piece in Haaretz. The article, an unmistakably sympathetic piece about the plight of Gazans, briefly mentioned Osama’s diagnosis, and was published the same day as the health director’s social media post.
What’s clear is that al-Boursh’s comments weren’t in response to the Israeli campaign to inform people of Osama’s unique circumstances. The government made a point of sharing that news only a few days later, after an old photo of the emaciated boy, taken before his recovery, spread widely online and in the international press — including on the front page of an Italian newspaper, from whose pages a columnist declared that Jews in Israel are guilty of the “exact same” crimes the Nazis inflicted on them.
This type of Holocaust inversion is hardly new in the annals of the “new antisemitism,” and is understood as a form of Holocaust denial. But what of al-Boursh’s narrower claim? Was Israel behind a campaign to invent a comorbidity, and did it successfully dupe major media outlets?
Not unless they somehow fooled Osama’s own family. NBC didn’t cite Israelis when discussing Osama’s genetic disorder, but rather the boy’s grandmother:
Osama’s grandmother Um Ahmad Al-Raqab called on Israeli authorities to allow her grandson to be evacuated out of Gaza for treatment for cystic fibrosis. The boy had the ailment, which can make it difficult to maintain a healthy weight, when the war began and is now suffering with acute malnutrition.
“If he stays like this, he will die,” she said.
The Associated Press, for its part, cited Osama’s mother. Haaretz cited the AP story.
The outlets could have equally cited the boy’s uncle, who in April posted the following appeal to his Facebook page:
Due to the closure of the crossings, the condition of my nephew, Osama Al-Raqab, continues to deteriorate due to cystic fibrosis, malabsorption, weight loss, and malnutrition, as a result of his condition not being properly diagnosed. He urgently needs to travel to complete the tests, determine his condition, and prescribe the appropriate treatment.
We appeal to the concerned authorities to help us in his travel urgently. (Translated from Arabic by Google)
By insisting Osama was healthy, casting his state as representative of Gaza’s broader population, and claiming Israel was lying about it all, it was the the Gaza Health Ministry that sought to “mislead public opinion.”
Al-Boursh’s post should have served as a reminder of the Health Ministry’s dubious reliability. It was that same Hamas body, after all, that had previously duped the international media into falsely reporting that an Israeli airstrike killed 500 Palestinians sheltering at Gaza’s Ahli hospital. (Then, as now, the false claims served as a boost to Hamas.)
But the international press that wasn’t deterred then — it continued to treat the Ministry as a paragon of trustworthiness — wouldn’t be reminded of its propaganda efforts now. To the contrary, major media outlets followed the director’s lead.
It wasn’t just the Italian paper that erased Osama’s health challenges. So did the BBC. Anadolu Agency, Turkey’s state-run news wire, which said only that Osama was “once a healthy child.” And a top Gaza doctor purported that “what is happening to Osama is happening to all the children in the Gaza Strip.”
Nor was it only Osama’s condition that was concealed. The New York Times was one of many news outlets that led readers to believe Mohammed al-Mutawaq, a severely malnourished child, was otherwise a typical, healthy boy. Under a large, front-page photo of his emaciated body, the Times shared that, according to his mother, he “was born healthy.” An article in that day’s edition said the same.
But independent reporting by David Collier revealed a medical report signed by a Gaza doctor showing that Mohammed has cerebral palsy, a condition puts children at greater risk of malnutrition than the general public.
The Times eventually updated its article. “Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development,” it now states. CNN, which had also reported on Mohammed’s suffering, likewise updated its article to note that the child “suffers from a muscle disorder that requires physical therapy and special nutrition.”
Others, though, have failed to correct their stories. NPR not only failed to inform readers of his pre-existing condition, but also implied he was representative of all of Gaza’s children: “This is just one family. Gaza has about 1 million children — about half the population.”
Do the comorbidities in these and other cases matter?
They clearly do to the Gaza Health Ministry director who lied about them, and to the journalists who misled their audience. For them, it seems, the misinformation is meant to tell an inaccurate story about the scope of food insecurity in Gaza, which in turn is meant to sell a false story about Israel’s policies and intent. (The UN, which contributed to the crisis by failing to transfer hundreds of truckloads of food aid from their storage point in Gaza, is generally spared in these accounts.)
If the distorted news succeeds at inflaming anger at Israel and distracting from Hamas’s refusal to surrender and spare its citizens, Hamas counts it as a victory. We shouldn’t expect more from them. But in order to report news accurately and inform the public fully, journalists must describe outliers as outliers, not conceal the truth in the service of a narrative.
The truth, after all, doesn’t negate real suffering in Gaza. And the lies, though they may help Hamas, don’t protect Gazans. When reporters misrepresent outlying medical cases as representative of Gaza’s broader population, they violate their promise to report accurately, distract from efforts to properly measure and address the humanitarian crisis, and erode credibility essential for documenting and confronting suffering, in Gaza and beyond.
Last May, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations humanitarian chief, claimed 14,000 Gazan babies would die in two days without a surge of food aid. It quickly emerged that he wildly misrepresented the source report. (The actual report warned 14,000 children could suffer acute malnutrition over the course of a year — not that 14,000 babies would die in two days.)
Understandably, the fiasco led many to conclude the UN can’t be trusted to tell the truth about hunger. And now, with widespread misreporting, the circle of distrust grows.
Food insecurity in Gaza, a humanitarian crisis that disproportionately impacts those with preexisting health conditions, is real. But so is the propaganda war waged from the territory.