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What the New York Times Left Out of Its ‘Starving Gaza Children’ Story
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
A front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times accuses Israel of starving Gazan children to death.
The story, though, is missing crucial context.
The Times reports, “Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and around 0.8 percent of children under the age of 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organization said. Five months into the war, that appears to have spiked: About 15 percent of Gazan children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, as well as roughly 5 percent in the south, the World Health Organization said in February.”
The Times reports these numbers for Gaza, but it doesn’t say what the figures are in other places.
If you look them up, you’ll find that the same World Health Organization reports figures of “severe wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age” of 1.1 percent in the Marshall Islands, 3.1 percent in Oman, 2.4 percent in Pakistan, 4.5 percent in Saudi Arabia, 1.7 percent in South Africa, 5.5 percent in Syria, 2.7 percent in Thailand, and 5.4 percent in Yemen. The numbers were 0.7 percent in China, 0.6 percent in Cuba, 1.4 percent in Ecuador, 4.8 percent in Egypt in 2014, 4.9 percent in India in 2017, and 2.9 percent in Lebanon.
Got that? For all the Times hype about the “struggle” caused by the “blockade,” Gazans before the Hamas-initiated war were eating better than in some non-blockaded countries. That’s because the so-called blockade wasn’t designed to starve Gazans. It was intended — unsuccessfully, alas — to prevent the Hamas terrorist group from amassing more weaponry with which to kill Israelis.
Even months into the war, the 5 percent acute malnutrition rate reported by the WHO, if accurate, for Gazans who followed Israeli instructions to move south puts them in roughly the same shape as residents of India, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Why aren’t starving children in those non-Gaza countries on the front page of the Sunday New York Times? Because the Times can’t find a way to portray Jews as responsible for the deaths of those other children, and thus the news can’t be shoehorned into a classical antisemitic trope.
None of this is to deny that humanitarian conditions in Gaza are rough, or that some children are suffering. The fault for those conditions is with Hamas. The terrorist group could end the war immediately by surrendering and releasing the kidnapped hostages, but instead it cynically uses the civilian suffering as a way of advancing its diplomatic goal of surviving in power in Gaza after the war.
You might wonder who wrote the Times article. The first byline on the article is “Bilal Shbair,” a new byline to Times readers. As a former Israeli diplomat, Lenny Ben-David, noted in a social media post about what he called a “blood libel,” Shbair is frequently interviewed by National Public Radio as a Gaza “man on the street.” A 2021 NPR dispatch says, “Bilal Shbair, 34, teaches young children at an UNWRA school and lives with his wife and 20-month-old son in the central area of the Gaza Strip.”
UNRWA, whose full name is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is the UN’s agency dedicated solely to the refugees and descendants of Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence
Given what we now know about UNWRA facilities being used to shelter Hamas tunnel entrances and missile launchers, as well as about the extensive involvement of UNWRA personnel in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Shbair’s UNWRA background might be worth disclosing to Times readers.
No matter whose byline is on the piece, though, the ultimate responsibility to prevent the New York Times from tilting to anti-Israel propaganda rests with the newspaper’s editors, publisher, and owners. Sadly, the newspaper’s management these days seems to care more about catering to an Israel-hating global online audience than it does about maintaining whatever is left of the newspaper’s reputation for unbiased reporting.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The post What the New York Times Left Out of Its ‘Starving Gaza Children’ Story first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd
Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang
i24 News – A suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.
Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.
The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister
A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.
Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.
Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.
Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.
Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.
Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”
Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.
Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.
Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.
Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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