Photographing famine
With much of Gaza reduced to ruins and estimates courtesy of the Gazan health ministry of 60,000 dead including 17,000 children, the battle for food and water is now a crisis:
MAN: I swear, it's been four days since we've eaten and I can't stand, look at my hands shaking.
- Deutsche Welle News/SBS, 23 July 2025
Two million people fighting for the pickings delivered by a broken and vastly inadequate aid program.
Those convoys that do get through are swamped, while hundreds of the hungry and desperate have been shot dead:
CAITRÍONA PERRY: The UN Human Rights Office says more than 500 people have been killed trying to reach those aid points which are now run by the US and Israeli governments. A UN official has described the system as 'an abomination' and 'a death trap'. Israel rejects allegations that it has committed war crimes in Gaza.
- BBC News, 25 July 2025
The UN says nearly a quarter of the 2.1 million people in Gaza are now facing famine-like conditions and last week more than 100 aid agencies and NGOs accused the Israeli Government of laying siege to Gaza and restricting the flow of aid, which Israel denies, claiming large volumes of food are being pilfered by Hamas:
DAVID MENCER: There is a man-made shortage, but it's been engineered by Hamas. That's the point. That's the end of the sentence, which you don't include. This suffering exists because Hamas made it so. Here are the facts … There is no famine in Gaza. There is a famine of the truth.
- Sky News UK, 24 July 2025
There can be little cavilling however that children in Gaza are facing hunger—the disabled and vulnerable among them hardest hit.
Powerful evidence emerging in the past week courtesy of Palestinian journalists.
But it was the images of one child which stopped the world.
And a warning, these are difficult to see.
These photographs of 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq whose emaciated body is being denied the baby formula it needs.
Captured in the rubble of Gaza City by journalist Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini, the shocking photograph spurred one of the world's most proudly conservative newspapers to draw up this extraordinary edition:
FOR PITY'S SAKE STOP THIS NOW
- Daily Express, 23 July 2025
… and galvanised newspaper editors from Toronto to Sao Paolo to fill page one with similar scenes of agony and deprivation:
Forced into Famine
- Toronto Star, 24 July 2025
DON'T LOOK AWAY
- Daily Mirror, 26 July 2025
By Friday morning, Nine's The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were following suit.
The AFR ran confronting images inside the paper on Saturday, while SBS and the ABC have run similar pictures online and on TV.
We spoke to the photographer who took this harrowing image:
I saw the tent of the family … and went inside to start taking pictures. It was an incredibly difficult environment in every sense …
The woman in the photo is a widow; she lost her husband in the war. She is trying to raise her two children alone …
The war has deprived them of everything.
- Email, Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini, photographer, 26 July 2025
The BBC's International editor Jeremy Bowen, using a Palestinian freelancer, tracked down the boy's mother, Hedaya al-Muta'wi:
JEREMY BOWEN: His name is Mohammed, he's 18 months old and he weighs six kilos…
HEDAYA AL-MUTA'WI:
He can't stand up on his feet or sit because of the fatigue. We can't get baby formula for Mo, because the prices are too high. I go from one hospital to another trying to get him formula.
- BBC News, 26 July 2025
There are now also urgent concerns for the people behind the lens.
On Friday Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, the BBC and Reuters warned their journalists were facing the threat of starvation.
One of the ABC's own freelancers losing the ability to operate his camera and Al-arini told us he's not immune from the bleak realities either:
I fainted three times while taking photos due to hunger and thirst …
We lost our home, we are displaced, and the children cry constantly from hunger …
The displacement, the fight for survival, and the struggle between life and death experienced by the people here are beyond imagination.
- Email, Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini, photographer, 26 July 2025
The Sydney Morning Herald's veteran conflict photographer, Kate Geraghty, told us:
There are moments in history when an image is so powerful … that it can effect change and sometimes end wars …
… The images taken by the incredibly brave Palestinian photographers of children starving in Gaza … are such images.
- Email, Kate Geraghty, Photojournalist, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 2025
So consequential, the work of these photographers, on Saturday the Israeli military announced it would allow the resumption of air drops of food and reestablish safe routes for the deployment of aid convoys into the strip.
Evidence the right image at the right time can move the world.
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