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One might be forgiven for thinking that the summer of 2025 marked a new low in the already dismal saga of Gaza's humanitarian crises. Doctors there issued repeated, anguished warnings that infants were starving for want of baby formula. These alerts were dutifully amplified by the world's media and social platforms, complete with the usual calls for urgent global action. In time, this became one of the season's dominant tales of suffering.
The New York Times declared that 'Parents in Gaza Are Running Out of Ways to Feed Their Children," while The Guardian fretted that babies were "at risk of death from lack of formula."Most memorable, perhaps, were the photographs of emaciated children, their hollow-eyed images splashed across front pages everywhere. Desperate families pleaded for help, insisting they had "no formula, no supplements, no vitamins" with which to nourish their infants.
It later emerged that some of these children suffered from pre-existing conditions that had contributed to their plight. Yet much of the coverage pressed on with the implication that Israel was somehow starving them deliberately, by throttling the flow of aid.
Israel, for its part, insisted all along that ample supplies of infant formula were reaching Gaza. At the peak of the hysteria, its records showed over 1,400 tons of the stuff, specialist varieties included, had crossed into the Strip.
So one is left asking: where on earth had it all gone?
Into warehouses controlled by Hamas, as it turns out.
Only this week did anti-Hamas voices in Gaza reveal a facility run by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, brimming with vast stocks of baby formula and children's nutritional supplements—stocks that never reached those headline-grabbing families.
This, remember, is the very organization Israel has been combating these past two years. It is precisely why Hamas's eviction from power in Gaza must remain non-negotiable in any serious talk of lasting peace.
Hamas's war is not merely against Israel; it is waged with a cold calculation that places its own people's lives at risk whenever it serves the broader aim of erasing the Jewish state. Diverting or blocking aid, even aid meant for children, has long been part of that grim playbook. By courting Gazan suffering and then parading it before the world, Hamassholes turned heartbreaking pictures into weapons, shifting global sentiment against Israel. It fed selective narratives to willing outlets, all while dodging accountability for the misery it helped engineer. And, regrettably, it succeeded to a disturbing degree.
Those same media voices that so eagerly broadcast accusations of Israeli-induced starvation, complete with claims of blocked formula, have now fallen eerily quiet. A story that once commanded the world's attention has all but vanished now that the facts point elsewhere. Lying in Islam is known as taqiyya, and this is exactly what we are seeing here.
Hamas played the media masterfully, and the media obliged. By amplifying terrorist talking points through headlines, emotive imagery, and curated outrage, only to neglect corrections when the narrative collapsed, leading outlets revealed their susceptibility to manipulation whenever inconvenient truths threaten a preferred script.
Hamas has been the prime mover here, heedlessly endangering Palestinian and Israeli lives alike. It is high time the press reckoned with that fact, and with its own part in wrongly pinning the starvation of Gaza's innocents on Israel. Perhaps they're merely turning a blind eye.
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