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LAST UPDATE | 30 Jul
THE IMAGES OF starving children coming out of Gaza recently have been met with alarm by some of Israel’s closest allies, and dealt a blow to the propaganda narrative about its siege of the devastated Palestinian territory.
The reality of life in Gaza has even led US President Donald Trump to acknowledge that starvation is occurring, as his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to deny it is the case.
“There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza. We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza – otherwise, there would be no Gazans,” Netanyahu said this week.
But when Trump was asked on Monday if he agreed with Netanyahu’s statement, he said:
“I don’t know. Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry.”
He also said that he had told Israel to allow “every ounce” of food into Gaza.
“We can save a lot of people, I mean some of those kids. That’s real starvation; I see it and you can’t fake that. So we’re going to be even more involved.”
On Tuesday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC), a UN-backed monitor, said: “The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip.”
The UN’s World Food Programme has warned that the disaster unfolding in Gaza is reminiscent of famines seen in Ethiopia and Biafra in the 20th century, which resulted in millions of deaths.
Trump’s assertion that you can’t “fake” images of starving children is telling, especially considering the Israeli government’s repeated accusations that Palestinians are lying about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials have throughout the assault on Gaza – and long before it began in October 2023 – labelled videos and images of Palestinian suffering as examples of “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood).
The official account of the Israeli government on X shared a post on Tuesday that falls into that category of propaganda.
The post featured two images side by side: one of an emaciated young boy on the cover of the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, and the other of the same boy looking healthy and alert.
The boy is five-year-old Osama al-Raqab and the first photo was taken in Gaza in May.
The second photo was taken in Italy last month, where he was transferred for treatment for cystic fibrosis.
This is what a modern blood libel looks like:
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) July 28, 2025
A sick child. A hijacked photo. A lie that spreads faster than truth.
His name is Osama al-Raqab. He has cystic fibrosis, a serious genetic illness.
He’s been in Italy receiving treatment since June 12.
Israel enabled his medical… pic.twitter.com/cCY2GYmKLj
The Israel account on X said the fact that he was suffering from a genetic disorder disproved claims that he was suffering from malnutrition.
“This is what a modern blood libel looks like: A sick child. A hijacked photo. A lie that spreads faster than truth,” the post said, referring to the medieval, antisemitic myth that Jews drink human blood.
The post notes the boy’s name and that he has a serious genetic condition.
“He’s been in Italy receiving treatment since 12 June. Israel enabled his medical transfer from Gaza,” the post continued.
“But that didn’t stop media outlets from weaponizing his image NOT to tell his story, but in order to smear Israel. Because when it comes to Israel, facts are optional. Hate always finds a headline.”
The claim from Israel’s government that the original photo had been “hijacked” and presented as evidence of lies about starvation in Gaza is easily debunked.
Osama was among a number of starving children whose stories were told in an article published by the Associated Press back in May, before he was taken to Italy.
The article said Omar’s cystic fibrosis had worsened since the start of the war.
A lack of meat, fish and enzyme tablets to help him digest food meant he was in and out of hospital and suffered long bouts of chest infections and acute diarrhoea, his mother Mona told the AP.
“His bones poke through his skin. Osama, 5, weighs 20 pounds (9 kilos) and can hardly move or speak. Canned food offers him no nutrition,” the article said.
“With starvation in Gaza, we only eat canned lentils,” his mother said. “If the borders remain closed, we will lose that too.”
The disinformation the Israeli government has spread about this five-year-old boy has been repeated across many of the state’s official social media accounts, as Il Fatto Quotidiano noted in an article about the use of its front page.
“The front page of Il Fatto on 24 July has become a trend on social media,” journalist Riccardo Antoniucci wrote in today’s online edition of the paper.
“The credit goes to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which reshared it yesterday, certainly not to praise it, followed by a long list of Israeli embassy accounts around the world (including bots): France, Spain, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, even Armenia.”
As Antoniucci noted in his article, the photo of Osama from May shows him suffering from malnutrition and the second photo shows the difference that proper treatment and sustenance makes when it is actually available.
This attempt to portray Palestinians as liars is only the latest example of the Israeli government issuing easily refuted claims about its war on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials have routinely presented falsehoods as facts, fabricated or mischaracterised evidence and promoted conspiracy theories.
The most obvious and swiftly debunked effort to promote the “Pallywood” myth came just days into Israel’s assault on Gaza, when Netanyahu’s spokesperson to the Arab world, Ofir Gendelman, posted a video on X that showed make-up artists, actors and a film crew shooting a scene depicting the aftermath of an Israeli strike.
The video does show children with make-up applied to make them appear wounded and what appear to be paramedics rushing to help them.
Gendelman claimed the video showed Palestinians “fooling the international media and public opinion”.
“See for yourselves how they fake injuries and evacuating ‘injured’ civilians, all in front of the cameras. Pallywood gets busted again,” he wrote in the now deleted post.
The video is actually behind-the-scenes footage from a short film called The Reality, which is indeed a portrayal of Palestinian suffering, but it was not made in Palestine.
Its director, music video maker Mahmoud Ramzi, posted a series of articles in various languages on his Instagram account that debunked the misrepresentation of the footage.
Ramzi told the news outlet Reuters that The Reality was “a short movie that was filmed in Lebanon to show a glimpse of the pain that Gaza’s people endured. It was not filmed to mislead people or to fabricate any truth”.
In another example, one which bears similarities to the case of Omar al-Raqab, Israel’s official X account posted two pictures side-by-side and claimed that both showed the same person apparently pretending to be two different seriously injured men. The pictures were of two different people.
There have been many other examples of the “Pallywood” propaganda trope being spread online, with accusations that Palestinians are “crisis actors’, which is a term used by conspiracists like Alex Jones in the aftermath of school shootings in the United States.
More recently, the Israeli military claimed that Hamas has been running “a deliberate propaganda campaign” about the amount of humanitarian aid Israel is letting into Gaza.
“We operate every day to bring in aid, Hamas operates every day to create a perception of crisis. The international community needs to know the truth!”
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) July 25, 2025
-COL Abdullah Halabi, Head of the CLA Gaza, on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing. pic.twitter.com/xTwRod0rY4
In a video posted online by the military last week, colonel Abdullah Halabi said that “Hamas operates every day to create a perception of crisis”.
Standing in front of crates of aid, he blamed the delay in delivering it to Palestinians on the UN, which he said the Israeli military works with closely.
“Israel does not limit the number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip,” he said.
This is false, Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid after it violated a ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March this year. That blockade lasted until late May.
Since then, Israel has largely sidelined UN agencies and NGOs in the aid distribution system in Gaza, and replaced them with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli-backed project with opaque origins and funding.
Almost 1,000 people seeking aid at GHF and UN distribution sites have been killed by Israeli and mercenary fire since May, according to the UN.
Even before the total blockade, UN and NGO aid agencies had repeatedly urged Israel to allow more trucks to enter Gaza.
Today, the NGO Save the Children said that the number of children under five with acute malnutrition seen at its Gaza clinics has surged tenfold in the last four months.
According to the UN-backed IPC, one in three people is now going without food for days at a time in Gaza.
Hospitals are overwhelmed and have treated more than 20,000 children for acute malnutrition since April and at least 16 children under five have died from hunger-related causes since mid-July.
Israel has been accused by human rights organisations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of using starvation as a weapon of war.
It has also been accused of genocide in a case taken against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, and in a statement from UN experts published in May.
The ICJ case is ongoing and will likely not conclude until at least 2027.
And last year, the international Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. The warrants are still outstanding and the charges have not yet been ruled on.
Among the crimes the two men are accused of is the war crime of using “starvation as a method of warfare”.
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