The photo from Gaza that misled the world

There it was, on the front page of the New York Times: a photo of a painfully malnourished 18-month-old Gazan named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq. It was accompanied by the headline, ‘Young, old and sick starve to death in Gaza: “There Is nothing.”’

Published on 25 July, this image was quickly reused by other media, including the BBC, CNN and the Guardian to demonise Israel. It provided seeming proof that Israel was wilfully starving innocent people and, above all, children to death.

Yet within days, the real story behind the photo began to emerge. It was discovered that Mohammed suffered from a congenital genetic disease, and that this was the likely cause of his skeletal condition. The starvation narrative was further belied by the fact that his older brother showed no signs of emaciation. He was pictured near Mohammed, but was cropped out of the published photo.

The New York Times ran an apology on 29 July, in the form of an editor’s note beneath the article. But it was more of a non-apology. It stated that ‘children in Gaza are malnourished and starving’, before acknowledging that ‘new information’, including from the hospital that treated Mohammed, had come to light. It ended by reiterating its commitment to reporting from Gaza ‘bravely, sensitively and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war’.

So instead of explaining that the child’s skeletal condition may not actually be the result of starvation, the New York Times’ apology merely reinforced the article’s original message and congratulated itself on its own virtue. It has also been pointed out that the apology for a frontpage picture was published not on the newspaper’s regular X account, which has 55million followers, but on the paper’s public-relations X account, which has just 89,000 followers.

A friend who spent his career as a columnist and editor at several major American publications (but not the New York Times) explained that this egregious photo debacle is extremely unlikely to have been the result of a misstep by a single person. He explained to me the typical process of publishing a dramatic photo like this on the front page of a large daily newspaper. A photo editor and his or her bosses would have settled on this image among many. It would then likely have been shown at a story conference where senior and section editors, presenting their best offerings of the day, would have discussed what should go on the front page. Many of those editors would have murmured, ‘What a powerful image’. Because it is.

Then you get to the online production crew and the night-print crew, where at least a couple of editors would discuss how, exactly, to play the photo. They would discuss how big the image should be and where it should be placed. They would also decide whether to package it up with a story or put the photo out front but refer readers to the story on another web or print page. As my editor friend explains, it would have been a thought-through, deliberate process.

At every step, editors have to trust that the initial photo editors have ascertained the accuracy of the photo and the caption information. In this case, they would probably have asked the bureau chief or photo editor in Jerusalem and the foreign-affairs staff in New York to check the provenance and location of the photo, and the background of those depicted. Above all, they would have checked whether the story the picture tells is true – that the child was suffering from malnourishment, rather than, say, neglect or chronic disease.

My editor friend admits that mistakes do happen. But each person who handles the photo should have reaffirmed that everything about it is honest. Especially when the claim here is that Israel is, at the very least, allowing starvation.

The photographer and reporter in Gaza, and a slew of people in New York, should therefore have been certain that the child really was suffering from chronic malnourishment. But they clearly were not, and yet they published it anyway. This, my editor friend tells me, is a serious editorial failure. It is not quite as bad as plagiarism or fabulism, which editors should always catch. But it’s close.

Exposing an improperly vetted photograph suggesting mass famine does not in itself refute the narrative that Israel is letting civilians starve. But it does raise serious questions. If a photo seized on by Western media to demonise Israel turns out to be misleading, what else are they saying that might also not be true?