A long-running right-wing daily paper in the U.K. ran a front-page feature on Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza this week, staking out a position on the genocide that seemingly outflanks the purportedly left-wing Labour Party as Prime Minister Keir Starmer refuses to take decisive action to stop Israel’s assault.
Taking up the Daily Express’s entire front page on Wednesday was a picture of a 1-year-old baby boy whose bare body is completely emaciated, little more than skin and bone as he gives the camera a blank, pleading stare. He sits on the lap of his mother, with a black trash bag for a diaper.
Accompanying the picture is a headline that says: “For pity’s sake stop this now: The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all.”
Their story about the boy, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, details how al-Matouq weighs the same as a 3-month-old baby, despite his age. He lives in a tent with his mother in Gaza, where the starvation crisis has escalated dramatically in recent days due to Israel’s near-total aid blockade and regular food line massacres.
“With bones protruding through his brittle skin and no help on the horizon, Muhammad has dropped from 9kg to 6kg (13lbs) because of an apocalyptic humanitarian crisis,” the article says. “Hunger and suffering has now reached a level never seen before with at least 12 children dying from malnutrition in the past 48-hours alone. The world has now united in calling for an end to the torment that has unfolded because of aid blockades.”
Daily Express’s head of news, Callum Hoare, shared the “powerful” front page on X, calling out Israel for its atrocities.
“The brutal suffering in Gaza must end. The shocking image shows Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, one, who weighs the same as three-month old baby due to the humanitarian crisis following the continued blocking of basic aid to civilians by Israel,” Hoare wrote.
The Daily Express is synonymous with bigotry for many in the U.K., with a reputation especially for its anti-immigrant editorial slant. The Daily Express has even previously helped to manufacture consent for the genocide, Palestinian writer Hamza Yusuf pointed out on social media.
As such, many commentators noted that the feature is a sign of just how far Israel has gone in its genocide that a paper known for its bigotry would highlight the suffering of Palestinian children on its front page — while Labour leaders like Starmer and other politicians have refused to take decisive action, apart from a suspension of some arms licenses to Israel last year.
“The Daily Express is a right wing British newspaper that spends most of its time bashing immigrants. That it has devoted its front page to the starvation of Gaza is a sign of how dire the situation has become and how impossible it is to ignore,” wrote Independent correspondent Richard Hall on social media.
As Israel has worsened its humanitarian catastrophe and turned aid distribution into a death trap, the U.K. has done little to end the blockade.
Meanwhile, humanitarian aid groups are saying that the starvation crisis is reaching new levels, with a third of Gaza’s population — over 700,000 people — going days in a row without eating. Hunger experts have said that the level of starvation in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history.
“I’ve been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today,” said famine expert Alex de Waal in an interview with Democracy Now! on Monday.Meanwhile, corporate news outlets are, indeed, sweeping aside Israel’s atrocities. On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a column by right-wing writer Bret Stephens denying that Israel’s assault is a genocide, saying that Israel hasn’t killed enough people for its slaughter to be considered a genocide. This came after an Israeli Holocaust and genocide studies scholar, Omer Bartov, wrote an op-ed for the Times last week saying that it is his “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is committing genocide.
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