REPREHENSIBLE: Every Evangelical should be disgusted by the NYT accusing Israel of ‘starving’ a child in Gaza – none of it was true

DENVER, COLORADO — I’m livid.

You should be, too.

Every Evangelical Christian who values truth should be both sickened and angered by the conduct of the New York Times.

On Friday, the NYT published a front page story with this incendiary headline: “Young, Old, and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There’s nothing.’”

To illustrate their accusation that Israel is purposefully starving the two million residents of the Gaza Strip, the NYT ran a photo of a severely emaciated child being held in his mother’s arms as she looks distraught and he looks like he’s on the verge of death.

The story and photo flashed around the globe to the NYT‘s 10 million subscribers and to hundreds of millions more on social media.

ONE LIE AFTER ANOTHER

Yet it wasn’t true.

Rather, the story was full of one lie after another. 

The boy, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, in the photo is not starving to death.

Rather, he suffers from a rare and terrible genetic disorder.

That’s heart-breaking.

But it’s not starvation. 

The rest of his family isn’t starving. 

They’re struggling as anyone in a hot war zone would.

But they’re not starving. 

Any junior reporter or photographer for the NYT could have easily determined that before the story ran on Friday.

Any serious news editor would have spiked the story after doing basic fact-checking. 

But clearly the NYT didn’t care about reporting the truth. 

The story and photo advanced their worldview that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is cruel, the Israeli army is heartless, and an emaciated 18-month old child should become the poster child of Israel’s purposeful campaign of starvation and genocide. 

HERE ARE THE FACTS 

The truth is very different from what the NYT portrayed.

Here are the facts. 

The policy of the Israeli government is not to starve the people of Gaza.

To the contrary, Israel purposefully and actively facilitates the arrival and delivery of massive amounts of food and other humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Since in the fall of 2023, Israel Defense Forces has made it possible for 94,000 truckloads of food to enter Gaza.

That’s enough to feed 2 million people for two years.

Hundreds of trucks continue to enter Gaza.

Just yesterday, more than 200 trucks of food and other aid entered Gaza. 

What’s more, the IDF reported that 52 pallets of aid were airdropped into Gaza with cooperation from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

Meanwhile, the new American aid group – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), run by Dr. Johnnie Moore, a devout Evangelical Christian – has delivered some 90 million meals to Gazans in just the last two months. 

THE NEW YORK TIMES FINALLY ADMITS ITS STORY AND PHOTO ARE FALSE AND MISLEADING   

After five days of sending lies around the planet, the NYT finally admitted its story was bogus. 

“We recently ran a story about Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition,” noted a spokesperson for the NYT on Tuesday. 

“We since have learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to provide context about his pre-existing health problems.”

This retraction is pretty weak.

It’s hardly a full throated apology.

It was issued five full days after hundreds of millions of people read and saw the lies.

And it was issued on the NYT's PR channel on 𝕏, which has only 89,000 followers. 

It was not issued on the NYT’s main channel on 𝕏, which has 55 million followers.

This is sickening – and absolutely reprehensible.

Yet, sadly, not surprising. 

Indeed, it is yet another classic and cruel example of the very kind of “fake news” that continues to drive people’s trust in the so-called “mainstream” media ever lower. 

ALL ISRAEL NEWS WAS CREATED TO FIND AND TELL THE TRUTH 

This is exactly why my colleagues and I launched ALL ISRAEL NEWS on Sept. 1, 2020.

We were so sick of the avalanche of lies and the extreme bias against Israel – and against Jews and Christians – in so much of the media.

So, we decided to do something about it.

We decided to create a media platform dedicated to telling the truth about what’s really happening in Israel, among the Palestinians, and throughout the Arab and Muslim world – and explaining why it matters. 

A media platform run by Israeli Evangelicals and Messianic Jewish followers of Jesus committed to old fashioned journalism.

A media platform where facts matter, where truth is paramount; one that rejects the ugly and indefensible style of “fake news” engaged in by the NYT and far too many other media outlets and tries to do the exact opposite.

We hope that ALL ISRAEL NEWS can continue to be a source of honest, credible information for Evangelical leaders and laypeople, as well as for people of other faiths – or no faith.

We pray it will continue to be a source of solid and helpful education for our readers and YouTube viewers. 

And a source of thoughtful and careful analysis from a biblical worldview.

We’re so grateful that so many readers are finding our site and finding it helpful. 

In 2021, our traffic reached 2.2 million views.

Last year, it topped 68 million views. 

Yet, traffic isn’t our mission.

Truth is our mission.

And we’re more committed to finding and reporting the truth now than ever before.

Jesus put it best.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).