SATURDAY, JULY 26, 2025
In Gaza, mother and child: We've heard it said that starvation can be a difficult way to die.
It can also be a difficult thing to see, especially so if the starving person is, in fact, a child.
This was the week when the major news orgs began showing photos of such starving children. Yesterday morning, the New York Times did exactly that.
The Times published a very large photograph—a photo which dominated the space above the fold on the front page of its print editions. The caption beneath the photo said this:
Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. A doctor said the number of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza had risen sharply.
That was a tough photo to look at. Subscribers didn't need to be physicians to suspect that the child in the photograph was perhaps approaching death.
For those blocked by the newspaper's paywall, the photo can be seen here. To our eye, there's a hint of the Pietà there.
It was a very large photograph. Beneath that photo, a front-page report bore this headline:
Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: 'There Is Nothing'
Online, the dual headline says this:
Gazans Are Dying of Starvation
After 21 months of devastating conflict with Israel, Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians—the young, the old and the sick—are facing what aid groups say is impending famine.
On Thursday evening, the PBS NewsHour had aired a similar report—a report which condemned its viewers to look at similar visuals. Online, the PBS report carries this title:
Inside Gaza’s neonatal wards where babies born into a war zone battle the odds
You can watch that report by clicking here. "A warning," Nick Schifrin says before the visuals start. "The images in this story are disturbing."
We'd offer a different characterization:
Extremely hard to watch.
Viewing the visuals, we thought of somewhat similar visuals which emerged from Europe, in the last century, after General Eisenhower's troops finally reached some of the sites where, among other atrocities, starvation was occurring. Anne Frank, a sacred child who's known all over the world, was almost able to hang on long enough to be saved.
We thought of a saying—"Never again"—and of a major American movie.
More on that movie below. For now, this is the way a front-page report begins in today's New York Times:
No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.
But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.
In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.
Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from—and dying of—starvation.
For ourselves, we don't know why the food aid system has failed to work. But as the Times report continues from there, the reporting becomes more dire:
More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.
Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.
David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.
Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.
The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.
Last evening, on CNN, we watched as a doctor reported from Gaza about those food aid-related shootings. We can't give you the perfect truth about any of these disputed events. But that's what the news report says in today's New York Times.
Never again, or so the vow claimed. Then too, there's the painful 1964 film to which we've already referred:
The Pawnbroker
The Pawnbroker is a 1964 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the 1961 novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.
The film was the first produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor. It earned international acclaim for Steiger, launching his career as an A-list actor...
In 2008, The Pawnbroker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
Plot
In Nazi Germany, Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, is sent to a concentration camp along with his family. He witnesses his two children die and his wife raped by Nazi officers before she is killed.
Twenty-five years later, Nazerman is haunted by his memories. He operates a pawnshop in an East Harlem slum while living in an anonymous Long Island housing tract with his sister-in-law, who is also a Holocaust survivor, and her husband. Numbed and alienated by his experiences, he has trained himself not to show emotion. He describes himself as beyond bitter, viewing the poor people around him as "scum" and "rejects." He acts uninterested and cynical towards his desperate customers and gives them much less than their pawned goods are worth.
The plot continues from there. For better or worse, the film suggests that a person who, through no fault of his own, becomes the victim of unspeakable viciousness may perhaps, through no immediate fault of his own, be robbed on his own humanity in the process.
We frequently think of [NAME WTHHELD] at such times as these. More specifically, we think of the things she said about President Obama in the first few weeks after October 7.
We marvel anew at the remarkable things she said! We also marvel at the fact that we still see her on cable news programs—sometimes on CNN, sometimes on the Fox News Channel.
Last week, we even saw her praising God, along with Rachel Campos-Duffy, on Fox & Friends Weekend. Once again, we couldn't help remembering what she had said back then.
For the record, very few of us do as much as we possibly could about such events as the ones we're discussing. (We always marvel at the doctors and nurses who volunteer to go to such places to serve.)
Few of us do as much as we could! It might be worth keeping such thoughts in mind before we unload on the others.
