Gaza famine: We hold British institutions accountable for enabling this horror
Maryam, a 26-year-old Palestinian mother, with her malnourished 40-day-old son, Mahmoud, as they await treatment at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on 24 July 2025
Omar Abdel-Mannan writes in Middle East Eye on 28 July 2025:
I am a British-Egyptian paediatrician. I have travelled to Gaza for over a decade, working alongside local doctors and witnessing first-hand the impact of Israel’s blockade and bombardment on children’s health.
I know what it means to see preventable child death. But I have never in my lifetime witnessed this level of calculated cruelty, nor such cold complicity from those who claim to care about international law and children’s rights.
For the past few days, the faces of starving children in Gaza have flooded the pages of British newspapers: emaciated infants with hollow eyes, toddlers too weak to cry, babies dying in their mothers’ arms. It is as if the UK media suddenly discovered that children are being starved in Gaza.
But for those of us who work with children, who have spoken daily with doctors inside Gaza, who have begged governments and institutions to act for the last nine months, this horror is not news.
It is the inevitable outcome of a deliberate campaign of dehumanisation – sanctioned by the British mainstream media, shielded by the British government and carried out by an apartheid state with total impunity.
Media complicity
The images now shocking the nation did not appear in a vacuum. They are the final chapter of a story that the UK media has helped write from the beginning.
Now that children are starving to death on camera, the very same outlets have begun to backtrack – not out of principle, but self-preservation
For 20 months – and especially since October 2023 – British newspapers, broadcasters and politicians have regurgitated Israeli government talking points almost verbatim: human shields, terrorist infrastructure, no famine, Hamas is hiding food, Israel is doing its best.
Every excuse has been offered to rationalise the collective punishment of two million people – half of them children.
These narratives were not harmless. They built the scaffolding of disbelief that allowed genocide to unfold before our eyes. They gave cover to Israeli war crimes.
They undermined the testimonies of Palestinian doctors, UN officials, human rights experts and ordinary civilians begging to be believed. They manufactured public consent for ethnic cleansing.