The death of a child is a tragedy. The infliction of that death by deliberate starvation is an intolerable crime. And an image of such a starving child is a demand for justice, eliciting deep sympathy from almost everyone who sees such suffering. Outrageously, this compassion is being exploited by Hamas, the press, and United Nations humanitarian agencies for political ends — namely, to pressure Israel into unilaterally ending its war on Hamas.
This is far from the first time that the United Nations has misrepresented a famine, and it is undoubtedly not the last. The New York Times dutifully reported in 1995, “As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council, according to two scientists who surveyed the country for the Food and Agriculture Organization.” A subsequent study by the London School of Economics found UNICEF’s data baseless. Per the Washington Post, “child mortality figures provided to the United Nations were deliberately doctored by Saddam Hussein’s government to discredit the international community.” What the Washington Post failed to note is that the UNICEF report was co-authored by the Saddam Hussein regime.
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