New York Times: Israel isn’t starving healthy children to death. Just the ones with preexisting conditions.

By now, the latest instance of New York Times bias in covering Israel’s war on Gaza has already become notorious. A few days ago, the Times finally ran a feature story about starvation in Gaza. It included photographs and video of emaciated Palestinians that would have been a surprise to anyone who relied mainly on the Times for their news, although all too familiar to anyone who follows alternative media.

Israel’s propaganda army sprang into action to try and discredit the report. The propagandists succeeded. Five days after the original article, the paper ran a correction and added a paragraph to the original report, altering it. The Times’s correction was aimed at Muhammad Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a 18-month-old child. Little Muhammad looked skeletal in the photo in the Times article. The paper said that it had “since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems.”

Here was the Times’s big find:

“Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and muscle development.”

The pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. and elsewhere predictably jumped all over this “revelation,” to try and discredit the growing tsunami of global anger at Israel’s deliberate campaign to starve and murder civilians in Gaza. But let’s pause briefly to look more closely at the Times’s shameful role here.

Once again, the paper had yielded to pro-Israel pressure — and decided to “re-investigate” its own story. The Times took the time to contact the hospital that treated this (possibly dying) 18-month-old child, and to examine his medical records. What kind of journalist would agree to follow this obscene line of inquiry, while thousands of people are simultaneously being killed or starving elsewhere in Gaza? What kind of editor would divert their reporters from Israel’s ongoing crimes to trek through a landscape of rubble to track down the hospital records of an 18-month-old child?

What’s more, it turns out that the Times’s “correction” may in fact not be accurate. There are (so far unconfirmed reports) that Muhammad’s mother was interviewed, and said this:

“My son was born in December 2023, during the war, without any chronic illnesses. Doctors diagnosed him with microcephaly, which they said was caused by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy due to the Israeli war.”

Writer Nathan Robinson makes the following logical point: “Of course the first people to die have pre-existing health problems. Starvation is a eugenic policy which first kills off the weakest and sickest. Israel acts like proving ‘preexisting health problems’ is a defense. It’s an indictment.”

Meanwhile, the Times has hardly pursued other Gaza stories with the same zeal. Let’s take just one example: the fate of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. The Israeli military arrested Dr. Safiya on December 27. Israel has jailed him since then, and there are alarming reports that “he has been beaten, starved, isolated and cut off from his family.” Amnesty International has declared him a prisoner of conscience.

This site, among others, repeatedly raised Dr. Safiya’s case, starting back in January. But the New York Times continues to ignore him, even though he has an international reputation and plenty of contacts in the global medical community.

Also, the speed with which the Times responded to criticism to its article about an 18-month-old child contrasts with its behavior in other celebrated cases. Among the most notorious was its article headlined “Screams Without Words,” about sexual violence in the October 7 attack on Israel, which ran in December 2023. That report provoked a storm of controversy, and some 50 tenured professors of journalism asked the paper to review its coverage. So far, the Times has refused.