It’s tempting to dismiss widespread hunger in Gaza because you see one adult with full cheeks,
And another adult with a belly. The point is that those are examples. Generally, adults appear well-fed. Even in the photo posted by sothernhybrid above with the guy carrying some cardboard boxes, the people in the photo look well-fed to me.
Young children, with their tiny fat and muscle reserves, can fall into life-threatening wasting within days of insufficient food, while adults draw on longer-term stores and often don’t look “skeletal” even as their bodies break down.
Yes, children have less reserves. But also, some children have underlying health conditions, and some of them are used as subjects of these propaganda photos.
The Truth Behind the Viral Gazan Famine Photo
David Collier said:
This isn’t the face of famine. It’s the face of a medically vulnerable child whose suffering was hijacked and weaponised – first by Hamas, then by global media.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock all week, you would have seen the viral images of Mohammed, the child victim of the Gazan ‘famine’. The image used by most of these outlets was licensed to Anadolu, a Turkish state-run news agency headquartered in Ankara. The photos were taken by the Gaza-based photographer, Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini, and uploaded to his Instagram account on 22nd July – a day before the Express splashed it across their front page. But in fact another Gazan based account, Saeed Mohammed had shared similar images even earlier.
[...]
Except this image proves none of it. Wider and unpublished pictures show Mohammed’s healthy brother Joud, who was born on 18 April 2022 and is 3 years old. Mohammed was born on 23 December 2023, just two months after October 7.
What we can see from the pictures is that both Mohammed’s mother and his older brother, look healthy and are not suffering from any type of starvation that would be necessary to cause the thinness suffered by Mohammed.
[...]
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq /Mutawwaq (was born with serious genetic disorders. He has needed specialist medical supplements since birth. Like previous examples of the media using ‘starving children’ going back to summer 2024 – the image is of a child suffering underlying (and hidden) health issues.
A medical report issued in May 2025 by the Basma Association for Relief in Gaza states that Mohammed, has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy – a group of neurological disorders affecting movement, muscle tone, and posture. The report notes that Mohammed suffers from hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood), possibly linked to a suspected genetic disorder inherited in an ‘autosomal recessive pattern.’
As I have been saying.
The story being told through legacy media outlets such as the NYT is that Mohammed’s father was killed while going out to collect food. Again, to underline the Gaza hunger tragedy narrative. This has been reported without any attempt at verification. From the death certificate I can see the father Zakaria Ayoub Al-Matouq / Mutawwaq (زكريا أيوب المطوق) was killed on 28 October 2024: From online sources it turns out that Mohammed’s father, was killed in Jabalia, in what appears to be a targeted strike on ‘al Qassabeeb’ street. We can also see that Hamas were attacking the IDF in precisely that spot at the time (posts from 26 & 27th October).
While that is not proof since it could be a coincidence, it seems that it is likely that Little Mohammed's father indeed was a Hamasnik.
Of course, in propaganda accounts, every single killed Gazan is a civilian who did things like go out for food. Nobody who is killed is a fighter for Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they would have us believe.
I also wonder if the two parents are cousins. Consanguineous marriage is very common in Gaza, and it leads to higher prevalence of genetic disorders.
The spread of inbreeding marriages in Palestine
"Marry your cousin, keep the problems away". LMAO!
Worse still, severe protein deficiency can trigger kwashiorkor, where fluid accumulates under the skin and makes faces appear deceptively swollen rather than nourished.
Bisan does not look like she is suffering from kwashiorkor. She has made a lot of these videos, and she looks similar to how she's always looked.
On the ground, the facts are grim and unambiguous: UNRWA screening finds that roughly ten percent of Gaza’s children under five are clinically malnourished, and Médecins Sans Frontières has documented a three-fold spike in acute malnutrition among toddlers, with many tens of thousands in urgent need of therapeutic feeding.
UNRWA is notoriously biased agaisnt Israel, and has been infiltrated by Hamas.
Evidence of antisemitic, violence- and hatred-inciting conduct by UNRWA teachers
The Connection Between UNRWA and Hamas in Gaza
MSF is the group that
facilitates human smuggling into Europe.
Neither of these groups is trustworthy.
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Relying on a handful of snapshots to dismiss a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe is a textbook stunt. A single image of a man hauling boxes tells us nothing about how long it’s been since his last meal. Adults burn fat and muscle much more slowly than children, so severe hunger often shows up first as wasting or edema in little ones while grown-ups can still carry weight—or even retain fluid that makes them look plumper. The only way to know who’s truly malnourished is through systematic measurements—mid-upper-arm circumference, weight-for-height scores, blood protein levels—and those clinical surveys in Gaza’s clinics are ringing alarm bells, not random Instagram posts.
Cherry-picking one family to paint every starving child as a Hamas agent is not skepticism—it’s cynicism. The “viral famine photo” exposé you link is a partisan blog that makes wild leaps from one family’s background to dismissing thousands of independent medical assessments. Underlying health conditions and genetic disorders from cousin marriage are a separate public-health issue; they do not cause the acute wasting, edema, fungal infections and biochemical markers that define kwashiorkor and marasmus. To suggest otherwise is to conflate distinct medical realities and distract from the hard data showing tens of thousands of children in critical condition.
Khwashiorkor is not a static look that you can confirm or deny with TikTok highlights. Fluid retention can ebb and flow, and a brief edit of a smiling child tells you nothing about her mid-upper-arm circumference or blood albumin. The clinics in Gaza are filling malnutrition wards with kids who pass all clinical thresholds for emergency feeding—children you never see online. Your impression from a polished video clip is irrelevant next to those medical admissions.
Yes, some UNRWA staff were dismissed over misconduct, but its nutrition surveys adhere to internationally recognized standards and are independently audited by WHO, UNICEF and the World Food Programme. Médecins Sans Frontières rescues migrants at sea under binding maritime law—not “smuggles” them—and their Gaza operations run under strict neutrality and medical ethics. Smearing these agencies to discredit every report on Gaza’s malnutrition is a strategy to bury the facts. It fails to explain why ovens in UN clinics are baking therapeutic peanut-paste sachets by the thousands while ward after ward remains packed with children on the brink of starvation.
NHC
Rather than buy a new one outright, I decided to finance the purchase entirely through making and selling art, which I have now done.