On July 27, 2025, David Collier posted about media complicity in the promotion of a libel against Israel that involved a photo of a tragically sick, emaciated Palestinian baby by named Mohammed. The photo was originally taken by the Gaza-based photographer, Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini and uploaded to his Instagram account on July 22 – framed, falsely, as how Gaza was gripped by ‘mass starvation’ due to alleged Israeli restrictions on aid.
Within days, Collier noted, the photo – and the Gaza photographer’s framing of it – was published by the BBC, Daily Express, Sky News, CNN, The Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Times, The Times and many others, in a manner reinforcing the false child starvation narrative.
Collier, however, revealed medical records showing that the emaciated appearance of the boy, whose mother and brother were both healthy, was due to him suffering from cerebral palsy – a group of neurological disorders affecting movement, muscle tone, and posture. The medical records Collier obtained noted that Mohammed also suffers from hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood), possibly linked to a suspected genetic disorder.
Some outlets backtracked following Collier’s expose. In fact, we were able to convince the Guardian to revise a caption under a photo of the boy to note that he suffers from cerebral palsy. However, as our CAMERA colleagues explained at the time, the initial exposure of that decontextualized and highly evocative photo nonetheless served as a propaganda win for Hamas.
While outlets have been more careful with that photo since Collier’s reporting, this past Thursday, we posted on X about a Times article (“Ireland and Spain boycott Eurovision 2026 after Israel allowed to compete“, Dec. 4) which included the same photo, along with a caption omitting the boy’s pre-existing conditions.
In that same X thread, in which the Times journalist, Gabrielle Sivia Weiniger, was tagged, we pointed out a grossly misleading paragraph later in the same article: her report that five Palestinian family members were killed by IDF fire without noting the initial Hamas attack, which left five soldiers injured, that prompted the IDF counter-attack on terror targets that allegedly resulted in civilian deaths.
Shortly after our X post, the photo of the sick boy was removed from the article, and the paragraph with the grossly misleading sentence about Gaza was completely deleted.
However, contrary to normal journalistic practices, editors failed to add an addendum explaining the corrections.
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