We have appended an Editors' Note about Mohammed Zakaria, a child in Gaza | Hacker News Reader

We have appended an Editors' Note about Mohammed Zakaria, a child in Gaza

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20 pointsfoobar50216 comments

The issue here is, If ( media and others ) they are prepared to use incorrect images and information that child is the way they are - because of starvation is - what else are they prepared to "bend the truth" or propagate wrong information on ???.

(Many other media used this story - so it ashows how media just copies information without it seems any verification ....)

Israel won't let journalists into Gaza. Until that ends and reporting on the genocide and ethnic cleansing is allowed to be accurately reported your comment is at best ironic and at worst defending an obvious genocide.

OBSERVATION - War fighting in suburban areas normally has a high civilian death rate. I do not know how it goes to the rate in Gaza ie Low/comparable/high

There is also , very unfortunate to say accidents . Not making a excuse - just look at previous wars. Example involving US was - collateral murder

Why did Israel ever give warnings for civilians to leave areas , if they set on deliberate genocide?

OBSERVATION - dropping 500lb bombs isn't fighting it's annihilating indiscriminately and without any care as to who is killed knowing full well most will be utterly innocent. There is no excuse for this. It it mass state sponsored murder and maiming.

Why not a retraction? Do newspapers do that anymore or just put oops my bad statements ?

A retraction is for when a paper says something which is not true. In this case they are adding additional detail to something which is true; a retraction would make no sense.

Indeed in this case what they are surely doing is resisting an onslaught of bullying pressure to retract, by addressing it this way.

Unusual for the NYT to show this much spine but perhaps their bravery reflects a growing unease in the chattering around the US administration about their own policy choices that have emerged out of what people charitably assumed was Trump's dark satirical trolling about turning Gaza into a riviera to try to provoke capitulation.

What has gone on here -- and the low key "they aren't starving, this is just the long term consequences of not getting enough food" talking point sleight of hand -- feels like the origin story of some future event that will bring about the end of the western world. We have not even the pretence of morality here.

Why would they? Does starvation not aggravate all pre-existing conditions?

The fact that anyone on earth is splitting hairs about this shows you how desperately messed up everything is.

There is absolutely no moral victory whatsoever in defining down starvation, but that is what is happening, ultimately, whether in this story or in any others.

This is a routine thing that happens on social media in regards to Israel. A child with a terrible disease, or a child from a different conflict like Syria, will go viral with a headline "look how terrible israel is causing this disease"

At a time when most of the world is critizing Israel's food distribution program in Gaza (who its at war with), correctly stating the child is diseased and not simply suffering malnutrition is relevant.

Unrelated

I live in NYC, Occasionally walking around with my dad (doctor), well see someone who is skin and bone.

My impulse is the person has anorexia, he says no, that person has late stage X disease. Just incorrect to think the woman has anorexia due to a mental disorder when she has organ failjre happening due to something else.

The account where this note is published is @NYTimesPR. It has 89K followers. Their main account, @nytimes, has 55M followers. Not only is this short of a retraction, but they chose to distribute it on a channel with 0.16% of their main account followers.

The editor's note in full:

> This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.

So a child starving to death also had "pre-existing health problems". What are they? Do they explain why he's severely malnourished? Are they actually relevant at all, or is this just a bullshit qualification meant to undermine any errant sympathy for a starving Palestinian boy? If only there were a journalist around to tell us!

Or could the photographer have found other children that looked like they were in Bergen-Belsen?

And then released unfiltered photos?

I'm sure it's possible--I don't doubt the starvation--but I suspect persuasion/propaganda has been more of the Zeitgeist in that area for too long

This is the problem with the editors here using weasel phrasing like "pre-existing health problems" while at the same time still strongly implying that this child's condition is caused by starvation. In fact he suffers from cerebral palsy, and other photos from the same photoshoot clearly show his apparently healthy brother and mother present at the same time. Source: https://david-collier.com/the-truth-behind-the-viral-gaza-fa...

Two paragraphs in and it's clear that your source exist exclusively to pump out hasbara (note the scare quotes around "famine"). Thousands of Gazan children are experiencing malnutrition and a child has died of starvation every single day for the past two weeks: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/nx-s1-5483520/gaza-famine-hun...

> The report said that more than 20,000 children have been admitted for acute malnutrition treatment between April and mid-July, with more than 3,000 of them severely malnourished. Hospitals have also reported a surge in hunger-related deaths among children under 5, with at least 16 fatalities recorded since July 17 alone.

Would the Wall Street Journal be more acceptable to you? https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gaza-starvation-photos-tell-a-th...

Literally the first sentence of the op-ed admits propaganda from the IDF, which tightly controls what embedded reporters are allowed to see and say [1]:

> Over the weekend, I embedded with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, where I saw the enormous quantities of humanitarian aid the United Nations has been refusing to distribute.

Very weird that the military that controls access to the Gaza Strip is blaming the UN? Delivering aid themselves is ostensibly why Israel and the US created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (although the true motivation seems to be gathering desperate Palestinians in one spot so they can mass murder them; more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF's soldiers and mercenaries at GHF aid sites [2]).

Anyway, this conversation obviously isn't going to go anywhere. I'll just end by saying that it's extremely obvious to anyone remotely paying attention that Israel is committing depraved war crimes against a defenseless people here, which is why public opinion has shifted so dramatically against it.

Edit: I just looked up the author of that WSJ article and he's a former IDF sergeant? Pretty relevant detail for him to omit!

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/176919/cnn-abc-nbc-reporters...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Strip_aid_distributi...

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