NYT Walks Back Story on Starving Gaza Baby, Citing “Pre-Existing” Condition

The New York Times is facing heavy criticism after it walked back part of a story it published last week detailing children’s starvation in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s famine and extermination campaign. The move came after Zionists mounted what is effectively a smear campaign against the story of an emaciated Palestinian baby.

In a statement issued Tuesday, the Times said that it appended a correction to the story after the paper “learned new information” about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, an 18-month-old baby suffering from severe malnutrition in Gaza. In a lengthy paragraph, the paper clarified that Mohammed has a “pre-existing” health condition — seemingly seeking to downplay the baby and his family’s suffering.

Mohammed was born in December 2023 amid the genocide, and weighs the same as a 3-month-old baby, other outlets have reported. Pictures of him went viral last week as his story was published by numerous news outlets, with the baby’s suffering shown to the world: Mohammed’s bones push through his wrinkled skin, his every vertebra and rib visible, while some photos show him wearing a trash bag for a diaper due to Israel’s blockade on all basic necessities.

Mohammed’s mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, has said that Mohammed was born without chronic illnesses — and that his health issues have stemmed from Israel’s near-total food and aid blockade. “Doctors diagnosed him with macrocephaly, which they said was caused by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy due to the Israeli war,” she told Misbar.

The baby was doing okay until recent months, she said, when Israel worsened its blockade and began widespread use of humanitarian aid as a honeytrap to kill more Palestinians via the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Mohammed is just one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians suffering from starvation in Gaza. The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading authority on hunger across the world, warned on Tuesday that the “worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” It said that all 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of experiencing famine, and that it is undergoing an analysis to officially declare a famine “without delay.”

The Times, however, seemingly seeks to downplay the starvation campaign by elevating a smear campaign by Zionists who pushed back on Mohammed’s story when it circulated last week. Zionist groups like HonestReporting and CAMERA said that his story is a “lie” because of his health condition.

But pre-existing health conditions neither shield someone from starving nor make it so that it is less dire or sympathetic if they are; pre-existing conditions actually make a person more vulnerable to starvation and disease. The New York Times’s correction, critics said, in fact makes the story even more horrifying.

The statement “actually makes it even more grotesque,” said Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson. “Of course the first people to die have pre-existing health problems. Starvation is a eugenic policy which first kills off the weakest and sickest. Israel acts like proving ‘preexisting health problems’ is a defense. It’s an indictment.”

Other advocates for Palestinian rights pointed out that the Times has failed to issue a correction for its “Screams Without Words” story about sexual violence during the October 7, 2023, attack — even though it was debunked and dozens of journalists and journalism professors urged the Times to vet and potentially retract the story.

Zionists, meanwhile, are still unhappy with the Times’s statement on Mohammed, saying that it was wrong for the paper to report on Israel’s mass starvation in Gaza to begin with.“NYT, you knew that Hamas uses babies with preexisting illnesses,” said former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in a bizarre claim, without evidence. “This is a blood libel in 2025.”