Viral images of starving Gaza boy don't tell the whole story because he suffers from genetic disorders, critics say
The heart-rending photo of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq made the rounds on outlets including the New York Times, NBC News, The Guardian, BBC and others as evidence that Israel's war against Hamas has led to the starvation of children in the Palestinian enclave.
But pro-Israel group HonestReporting first spotted something the outlets either didn't notice or outright ignored: the boy's older brother, Joud, standing in the background looking like he was in much better condition.
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5 Palestinian child Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq being held by his mother in Gaza City on July 21, 2025.
Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images
5 A photo of Muhammad went viral last week as alleged evidence of starvation in Gaza.
Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images
In a video segment, CNN said Muhammad's own mother revealed that he suffers from a 'muscle disorder' for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy, saying he was 'happy' and able to 'sit upright' when they were provided.
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Pro-Israel journalist David Collier said little Muhammad has 'cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder,' citing a May 2025 medical report from Gaza.
In viral photos, taken on July 22 by Turkey's state-owned Anadolu news agency, Muhammad's spine protrudes from his tiny back as his mother cradles him in her arms.
The BBC interviewed the image's photographer, Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim al-Arini, who suggested the photo was representative of the widespread starvation that has taken hold in the Gaza Strip.
5 Muhammad suffers from genetic disorders and other issues including cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, according to a report.
Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images
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5 Muhammad's mother told CNN that he has a 'muscle disorder' that requires physical therapy and specialized nutrition.
Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Guardian captioned a photo of Muhammad as 'facing life-threatening malnutrition,' while the
UK's Daily Express described it as 'a horrifying image encapsulating the 'maelstrom of human misery' gripping Gaza.'
The Israeli Foreign Ministry says it has allowed around 4,500 aid trucks into Gaza since lifting a blockade in May, and that 700 more are waiting to be picked up by the UN.
A UN report earlier this month asserted that that 9% of children screened at health clinics across Gaza are suffering from severe malnutrition — a sharp rise from the 6% found in June.
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5 The image's photographer Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim al-Arini told the BBC Muhammad represents the situation in Gaza.
Anadolu via Getty Images
The Hamas-controlled health ministry claims that 20 children have died from malnutrition related causes in the last three weeks.
The United Nations has also accused Israel of choking the flow of aid and making Israeli and US-backed aid efforts dangerous for civilians.
Palestinians blame Israel for the sluggish pace of deliveries, but the Jewish state has repeatedly retorted that its efforts to allow aid to flow into Gaza must be carefully controlled so Hamas fighters don't intercept the shipments.
On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said it will be initiating a 'local tactical pause' in military activity to allow more aid to get into Gaza, but that distributing food within Gaza 'lies with the UN and international aid organizations' who they say must 'ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas.'
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Vox
5 hours ago
- Vox
What happens when we lose global health data?
is a fellow for Future Perfect. He reports on global health, science, and biomedicine, focusing on how policies and systems shape progress. A census enumerator, right, talks with a Maasai woman during the population and housing census, the first time being conducted digitally, at a village in Engikaret on August 23, 2022. AFP via Getty Images When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk fed the US Agency for International Development into the wood chipper earlier this year, one of the lesser-known casualties was the shutdown of an obscure but crucial program that tracked public health information on about half of the world's nations. For nearly 40 years, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program has served as the world's health report card. In that time, it has carried out over 400 nationally representative surveys in more than 90 countries, capturing a wide range of vital signs such as maternal and child health, nutrition, education levels, access to water and sanitation, and the prevalence of diseases like HIV and malaria. Taken together, it offered perhaps the clearest picture ever compiled of global health. And that clarity came from how rigorous these surveys were. Each one started with a globally vetted blueprint of questions, used by hundreds of trained local surveyors who went door-to-door, conducting face-to-face interviews in people's homes. The final, anonymized data was then processed by a single contractor ICF International, a private consulting firm based in Reston, Virginia, which made the results standardized and comparable across countries and over time. Its data powered global estimates from institutions like the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which in turn shaped public health policy, research, and funding decisions around the world. 'If DHS didn't exist, comparing anemia across countries would be a PhD thesis,' said Doug Johnson, a senior statistician at the nonprofit IDinsight. Crucially, DHS also tracked things few other systems touched, like gender-based violence, women's autonomy, and attitudes toward domestic abuse. Doctor's offices aren't representative and only capture folks who can access a formal health care system. Also, since DHS data is anonymized, unlike a police report, responders don't have to fear intervention if they don't want it. 'You can't get answers from other sources to sensitive questions like the ones DHS posed,' said Haoyi Chen from the UN Statistics Division, pointing to one example: Is a husband justified in beating his wife if she burns the food? Then, earlier this year, DHS was shut down. The decision came as part of the Rescissions Act of 2025, a bill passed in June that clawed back $9.4 billion from foreign aid and other programs. Eliminating DHS saved the government some $47 million a year — only about 0.1 percent of the total US aid budget, or half the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. That tiny budget cut has had immediate consequences. The move halted around 24 in-progress country surveys – 10 of which were just short of final publication, and three in Ethiopia, Guinea, and Uganda that were stopped mid-fieldwork. The program's public-facing website remains up, but the machinery behind it is gone. With no one to approve new applications, the process for researchers to access the underlying microdata has ground to a halt. How the DHS has saved lives The shutdown isn't just about numbers on a spreadsheet. Here's how DHS data has shaped policy and saved lives across the globe. Guinea: DHS data was used to help tailor the rollout of the new malaria vaccine India: The 2019–2021 national survey (India's version of the DHS) showed a stark gap in menstrual hygiene between urban and rural areas, which prompted a new national policy to address the disparity. Nepal: A 2016 DHS survey revealed stagnating maternal mortality rates. This spurred the government to enhance its Safe Motherhood Program , resulting in more women delivering babies in health facilities rather than homes — and fewer women dying in childbirth. Nigeria: DHS surveys showed child marriage rates as high as 76 percent in some states. Advocates used that as evidence to successfully push local governments to strengthen their laws against the practice. There will also be long-term damage. When governments or aid organizations can no longer see exactly where children are malnourished, where malaria outbreaks are quietly spreading, or where mothers are dying in childbirth, they can't effectively target life-saving interventions, leaving the most vulnerable populations to pay the price. For 24 countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali, the DHS was the sole data source for the UN's official maternal mortality estimates. Going forward, 'it would just be basically estimates that are based on other countries' data,' says Saloni Dattani, a editor on science and global health at Works in Progress magazine and 2022 Future Perfect 50 honoree. 'We just wouldn't know.' Without the data DHS provided, foreign aid becomes less effective, and less accountable 'We have no way of externally or objectively estimating the positive impact that those [aid] programs are having, or negative,' said Livia Montana, the former deputy director of the DHS Program, who is now a survey director for the Understanding America Study at the University of Southern California. Naturally, the global health community has been scrambling to plug the enormous gap. The Gates Foundation recently committed $25 million in emergency funding to rescue some ongoing surveys, and Bloomberg Philanthropies has also stepped in with a separate commitment to support the effort. This funding is a crucial lifeline, but only a stopgap. The search for a long-term fix has forced a reckoning with the old programs' flaws. Everyone agrees that DHS delivered high-quality, trusted data — but it wasn't perfect. Many experts have criticized it as fundamentally 'donor-driven,' with priorities that didn't always align with the national interests of the countries it surveyed. For instance, the program's historic focus on reproductive health was a direct reflection of the priorities of its primary funder, USAID, and some country officials privately felt the data served the accountability needs of international organizations better than their own immediate planning needs. This has created a central dilemma for the global development community: is it possible to build a new system that is both genuinely country-led and also globally comparable? A lifeline and a reckoning Faced with this data vacuum, an obvious question arises: Why can't other global organizations like the World Health Organization or the United Nations simply step in and take over? It's not out of the question, but it would be really, really difficult. Think of it this way: The DHS Program was like a single, powerful architecture firm that perfected a blueprint and built houses in 90 neighborhoods for 40 years. Because it was a single program managed by private contractor, ICF International, and backed by one major funder, USAID, it could enforce a standardized methodology everywhere it worked. As a for-profit firm, ICF's interest was also financial, it managed the global contract and profited from the work. The UN and WHO, by contrast, act as the global city planners: Their mandate isn't to design and build the houses themselves, but to set the building codes and safety standards for everyone. According to WHO, its role is not to 'directly fund population-based surveys,' but to provide leadership and bring the right stakeholders together. While that mandate may prevent the UN from simply inheriting the old program's work, it makes it an ideal coordinator for the path forward, says Caren Grown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Sustainable Development. Grown argues that the UN is the only body that can handle the 'heavy lift' of coordinating all the different countries, donors, and organizations. And now that the DHS has been dissolved, both Grown and Chen are now part of a UN task force attempting to establish new internationally agreed-upon standards for how health data should be collected and governed. At the same time, other efforts are more focused on the practical work of implementation rather than on global governance. Montana is leading a coalition to 'rebuild elements of DHS' by creating a global consortium of research institutions that can provide technical support to countries. These efforts were catalyzed by initial conversations hosted by organizations like the Population Reference Bureau, which brought together donors, government agencies, and global data users to grapple with the shutdown's immediate aftermath. Critics argue that for every India, there are a dozen other nations where the program's sudden collapse is proof that a deep, sustainable capacity was never built. Between this mishmash, the most practical development has been a lifeline from the Gates Foundation, which announced a $25 million investment in 'bridge funding.' Separately, in a statement to Vox, Bloomberg Philanthropies confirmed its commitment to fund the completion of an additional 12-country surveys over the next eight months. A source from the Gates Foundation clarified that Bloomberg's commitment is on top of theirs, confirming the two are distinct but coordinated rescue efforts. The Gates Foundation framed its effort as a temporary, stabilizing measure designed to give the global health community a much-needed respite. 'We believe data is — and must remain — a global public good,' said Janet Zhou, a director focused on data and gender equality at the Gates Foundation. 'Our interim support is helping to stabilize 14 ongoing country surveys. … This investment is designed to give global partners and national governments the time and space needed to build a more sustainable, country-led model for health data.' That support is aimed at the most urgent work: finishing surveys that were nearly complete, like in Ethiopia, and reopening the four-decade-old data archive. But rather than giving each respective country the money to complete their ongoing surveys, the Gates funding will be administered by ICF International, the same for-profit firm that ran the original DHS. The decision to work with the existing contractor, ICF International, was a pragmatic one. Continuing with the same implementer was the 'quickest, most affordable way' to prevent waste, and 'multiple host countries have shared a preference' to complete their work with the firm, said a source at the Gates Foundation. A Sudanese mother sits with her children at a shelter in the al-Qanaa village in Sudan's southern White Nile state on September 14, 2021. Ashraf Shazly/AFP via Getty Images It's a powerful argument for triage in an emergency, but it also papers over deeper flaws. Take a look at Nigeria, for example: Fieldwork for its 2023–'24 DHS finished in May 2024, and the questionnaires gathered new estimates of maternal and child deaths. Nigeria also ran a separate study to probe exactly why mothers and children are dying. In principle, the two datasets should dovetail but beyond a headline-numbers report, the full DHS micro-dataset is still in ICF's processing queue — likely frozen after DHS's shuttering. That bottleneck illustrates what critics mean by 'donor-driven.' With barely 3 percent of household surveys in low-income countries fully-financed by the local government, the WHO notes, most nations must rely on 'externally led surveys…limiting continuity and national ownership.' When the donor funding stops, so does the data pipeline. An ICF spokesperson pushed back saying survey priorities were 'primarily shaped by the participating countries.' Yet, of the $25 million that arrived from Gates, a large portion of it will go toward completing large-scale surveys in Nigeria and Kenya, two countries that also happen to be key 'geographies of interest' for the Gates Foundation's own strategic priorities, underscoring how funders still steer the spotlight. Insiders I spoke with described ICF's system as a 'black box,' with key parts of its methodology controlled by the contractor, leaving countries without the capacity to stand on their own. That matters because without home-grown statisticians and know-how, ministries can't rerun surveys or update indicators without outside help. In response, ICF stated that the program has a 'proven track record of building a long-term capacity,' noting that countries like India no longer require its assistance. But critics argue that for every India, there are a dozen other nations where the program's sudden collapse is proof that a deep, sustainable capacity was never built. This dependency creates a fragile system that can, as just happened, collapse overnight, leaving countries unable to continue that work on their own. This unresolved tension brings the debate back to a central question from the UN's Chen. 'DHS has been there for four decades,' she asks, 'and why are we still having this program doing the survey for countries?' Chen's question gets to the heart of the debate. But grappling with the flaws of the past can't get in the way of surviving the present. Existing global health data is already several years out of date due to the pandemic, while crises in maternal mortality and child nutrition continue to unfold. The need is for reliable data now, because the fundamental reality remains: You can't help people you can't see.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Nurses punched in face at violent children's unit
Nurses have been assaulted and "punched in the face" amid violent behavioural problems at a hospital's children's unit, staff have told the BBC. Since April, nurses at the Great Western Hospital (GWH) in Swindon say a series of troubled teenagers have assaulted nurses, hit another child and verbally abused very young patients and their families. Other incidents have included a patient who "ripped a TV" from a wall and broke a sink. Numerous staff are now taking sick leave. A spokesperson for the GWH said: "Our children's ward is often the only place available locally for vulnerable children and young people up to the age of 18 with complex medical and mental health needs." Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership closed the Riverside adolescent mental health unit as a "temporary measure" in February 2024. But its continued closure means GWH has to do its best to cope with teenagers suffering form psychiatric conditions. The unit provides care to children up to the age of 18 and the hospitals does not have an adolescent mental health ward as an alternative. Statistics obtained by the BBC show that in the spring there were around 20 incidents relating to the behaviour of inpatients that involved harming themselves or others. In that time, 10 staff, other patients or family members were assaulted. 'Nothing has changed' The BBC has spoken to several nurses from the unit who say up to 15 members of staff have been off work because of violence. They said one nurse who remains off work was left seriously injured after being assaulted two years ago and has suffered ever since with hearing loss and PTSD. The nurses all want to remain anonymous. One said: "We kept saying what is it going to take? Still nothing has changed. "Is it going to take for a child to get hurt. We then had a child hurt on the ward." The nurse added that the stats were likely lower than the real number because staff find it difficult to find time to report them. The nurse described how she felt some incidents were not being dealt with seriously enough. "It is often put to us these children are unwell so in terms of reporting to the police we are made to feel we are doing wrong against the child. "We are a secure ward and have to buzz people in and out. "It's restrictions like that and some of the mental health patients we have to remove ligatures such as a hoody they then don't like because we are stopping them from hurting themselves. "The biggest trouble is we do go up to 18. Most children's wards go to 16. it almost feels like people run scared because it is children." 'Punched in face' Another nurse said: "A lot of children are medically fit to go home. No one wants to take them because of their escalating behaviour. "It has caused a lot of holes in walls, damaged pipes and lots of staff being hit with people being punched in face." The nurse went on to describe how four registered mental health nurses were unable to restrain one teenage girl who was also verbally abusing staff. "It is having a massive impact on patients and parents." She added: "One of my colleagues went off sick as this girl was smacking her head against the wall. The registered mental health nurses were just watching. The nurse said they have an "assessment unit for children to be assessed" which was then closed. This has left the hospital unit dealing with these cases. "One teenager was ripping TVs off the wall, she broke a sink. The whole wall has had to be replaced it has ... led to probably at least 15 staff being off sick," the nurse added. The nurse said that managers had done very little to address the situation apart from introducing a 'safe room' which has not been opened yet. Another nurse said: "We had a young person who was with us because she had taken an overdose and her behaviour escalated to the point that she was being looked after by three registered mental health agency nurses . "Her behaviour escalated and she assaulted nurses and security staff. She punched quite a few people." An NHS report in 2024 highlighted the difficulties of nursing teenagers on hospital wards alongside younger children. The South West director of the Royal College of Nursing, Susan Masters, said it is a national problem, adding: "This trust (GWH) is the local provision. There isn't another provision anywhere else for these young people to go which is why its very difficult here. "Children with physical health difficulties, young people with illnesses and procedures need a bright, distracting fun environment. "Children and young people with mental health distress need the opposite-very calming very sombre. The other issue of course is specialist nursing staff. "So currently these children are being cared for in an acute unit with children's' nurses that are not necessarily trained in specialist mental health services." A statement from GWH trust said: "We have individual rooms providing privacy and division between age groups, alongside two dedicated rooms for patients experiencing a mental health crisis. "Many of the children and young people we care for need specialised care and we are planning to recruit specialist mental health nurses so that we have the expertise to better support children and young people with severe mental health needs. "It's unacceptable that NHS staff face violence and abuse and we do all we can to keep our staff, patients and visitors safe. "This is a national issue, however these incidents can be extremely distressing, and we offer a package of mental health support to our staff, which includes de-briefing sessions and counselling services. "Our Never OK campaign, in partnership with Wiltshire Police, encourages staff to report all incidents and the police regularly visit the hospital and support our own security team." More news stories for Wiltshire Listen to the latest news for Wiltshire Follow BBC Wiltshire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
6 hours ago
8 die from hunger, including child, in Gaza over past day, health ministry says
LONDON and CAIRO -- Hospitals across the Gaza Strip recorded eight deaths -- a child among them -- "due to famine and malnutrition" over the past 24 hours, Gaza's Hamas-run Ministry of Health said Tuesday. At least 188 Palestinians, including 94 children, have died from hunger in Gaza since the ongoing war began, according to the health ministry.
