Debunking The Latest Genocide Denial From The Free Press.
The Free Press Continues It's Long Tradition Of Publishing Genocide Denial.
Warning to readers: This article contains graphic images of starving civilians.
The Zionist outlet “The Free Press,” headed by Zionist Bari Weiss, has just put out its most vile and dishonest article denying the Gaza Genocide yet, titled, “They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems”.
The article attempts to deny the mass starvation in Gaza by claiming that 9 Palestinians featured in news reports were actually suffering from other conditions and not starvation.
But a look at the sourcing for the article shows that the 9 Palestinians are indeed suffering from malnutrition and that the Israeli blockade is killing and starving the most vulnerable population in Gaza first.
Through taking quotes out of context, the authors of the piece, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, take a story of Israel’s starvation blockade harming the most vulnerable people in Gaza and spin it to make it look like Israel is innocent, when in reality, their own sources show that Israel is starving disabled people to death.
This is nothing out of the ordinary for a genocidal famine; in every case, the most vulnerable are the first to suffer.
Yet this vile article attempts to use that to clear Israel of guilt for its intentional famine.
As journalist Rania Khalek said of the Free Press’s article, “One day they will study these people in college courses on the psychology of genocide denial and incitement.”
In this article, I will debunk the “Free Press” vile, genocidal denial article.
Maryam Dawas
In the article, the authors profile 12 starving Palestinians in Gaza featured in media reports and attempt to claim that they are not actually being starved by Israel.
The first listed is Maryam Dawa, a 9-year-old Palestinian girl.
The article attempts to claim she is not actually starving by quoting her mother out of context, saying, “I suspect that Maryam has another problem besides malnutrition,” and “I suspect that my daughter has a condition that no one understands here in Gaza”.
But the video that the Free Press links to shows that Maryam Daw is clearly malnourished.
What her mother actually says in the video is, “I am the mother of the girl Maryam Dwass. Maryam is nine years old. Before the war, Maryam weighed 25kg. Now her weight is down to 9kg. I mean, just recently this week, Maryam lost weight in a shocking way. Maryam is suffering from severe malnutrition. Its symptoms include diarrhea”.
Her mother then goes on to say that she believes Maryam has another condition along with her diagnosed severe malnutrition, which doctors were not able to diagnose.
So in reality, the Free Press claimed that Maryam Dwass’ mother said she was suffering from a condition other than severe malnutrition, but in the video they link to, her mother makes it clear that she is suffering from severe malnutrition and possibly another condition on top of that, likely caused by the severe malnutrition.
Furthermore, the video linked to by the Free Press shows that Maryam Daw is clearly suffering from malnutrition due to the Israeli blockade.
Pictured Above: Maryam Dwass clearly suffering from severe malnutrition shown in the video the “Free Press” links to in order to deny she is suffering from severe malnutrition.
Youssef Matar
Youssef Matar is the next genocide victim slandered by the “Free Press,” a Palestinian toddler suffering from severe malnutrition due to the Israeli blockade.
In order to deny the Israeli genocide, the Free Press links to a Reuters caption of his mother holding him, which reads, “Displaced Palestinian mother Samah Matar holds her malnourished son Youssef, who suffers from cerebral palsy, at a school where they shelter amid a hunger crisis, in Gaza City, July 24, 2025.”
This caption does not in any way change the fact that he is malnourished because of the blockade, just because he has cerebral palsy.
The Free Press is basically trying to excuse Israel’s starvation blockade because it affects children with disabilities first.
Hamza Mishmish
The Free Press then attempts to smear Hamza Mishmish, a 25-year-old Palestinian with cerebral palsy suffering from the Israeli blockade.
Again, they take a quote out of context, linking to a video where they write that a woman who helped care for him says, “He has, of course, had a disability since birth—he has cerebral palsy and suffers from many countless illnesses. Everything with him is worsened because he has no immunity at all. His immune system is extremely, extremely weak”.
Again, the video that the Free Press links to shows that Hamza Mishmish is clearly suffering from severe malnutrition.
Again, what the Free Press leaves out is that the video’s description explains that Hamza Mishmish is suffering from severe malnutrition due to the blockade.
Its description says:
Palestinian youth Hamza Mishmish, 25, who has a disability, receives care from his family inside a tent in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. He suffers from severe malnutrition amid the worsening famine that is affecting both children and adults alike. Hamza lives in extremely harsh humanitarian conditions, facing a severe shortage of food and medical care due to the ongoing blockade and the closure of border crossings since last March
(Emphasis: Mine)
The Free Press tried to claim that Hamza Mishmish is only suffering from a disability, while ignoring that the video’s description clearly states he is suffering from severe malnutrition and is denied medical care due to the Israeli blockade.
Pictured Above: Hamza Mishmish, the 25-year-old Palestinian with cerebral palsy suffering from severe malnutrition due to the Israeli blockade.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj
Next, the Free Press lies about Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, a 6-year-old girl suffering from severe malnutrition in Gaza City.
The Free Press claims that in an article in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, her mother says that a “condition has accompanied her throughout her life” and that she has had “several ailments since birth”.
This quote again is taken completely out of context. What her mother actually says in the article is, “Najwa has been suffering from several diseases since her birth, most notably continuous vomiting when eating any food, and this condition has remained with her throughout her life, and during the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, her condition deteriorated, and she contracted malnutrition due to the lack of proper food for her. Najwa weighs only 7 kilograms, which prompted doctors to keep her in the hospital in order to follow up on her health condition, where she is given therapeutic milk, some nutritional supplements and biscuits fortified with vitamins, but her health condition is still poor.”
The article goes on to write, “Hajjaj (Najwa’s mother) explains that she struggles a lot to provide the necessary food for her family, as there are no fruits or vegetables available to support them with proteins and vitamins”.
Yet again, the fact that her mother stated that Najwa Hussein Hajjaj had “contracted malnutrition due to the lack of proper food for her” due to the Israeli blockade was left out of the Free Press article.
Mosab al-Debs
The Free Press’s smear against Mosab al-Debs, a 14-year-old Palestinian suffering from malnourishment, is one of the most shocking in the article.
It writes that somehow his starvation is not as bad because he was also shot in the head by the IDF, quoting his father saying, “My son was injured in the head, Part of his skull was removed”.
Yet again, the Free Press takes a quote out of context, citing an Instagram post saying “that he had suffered ‘severe brain hemorrhaging, leaving him completely paralyzed’”.
In reality, the actual post says :
On May 7, 2025, 14-year-old Musab Ali Musa Al-Dibs sustained a critical injury that resulted in a portion of his skull being removed and severe brain hemorrhaging, leaving him completely paralyzed. Since then, his condition has only worsened due to the ongoing famine in Gaza. Musab now suffers from acute malnutrition, and his immobility has led to extreme pressure ulcers, made worse by the lack of nutrition and basic medical supplies.
His mother, speaking from Al-Shifa Hospital, issued a heartfelt plea: “I appeal to the World Health Organization. I appeal to Save the Children. Please, get him out of Gaza. He deserves to be treated. I want to hear him say ‘Mom’ again. I’m losing him every day.”
The harrowing video linked to by the Free Press shows Mosab al-Debs’s mother crying and pleading for the international community to let her son out of Gaza so he can get proper food and medical treatment for his brain injury caused by the IDF, which he cannot get in Gaza due to the blockade.
In the video, she says, “I appeal to institutions, and the entire world to stand with my son and get him out of the Gaza strip, for treatment abroad”, “I see his condition deteriorating day by day I’m afraid of losing him, I swear to God I’m afraid of losing him every day”
Atef Abu Khater
This is perhaps the most disturbing section of the Free Press article. It lies about Atef Abu Khater, a 17-year-old boy in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition.
The Free Press attempts to deny this by citing an Al Jazeera interview where his father says he had a “mysterious illness” and said, “We did every possible test, but to no avail. His condition keeps deteriorating, and the doctors are unable to determine what the illness is or what caused it.”
This quote again is taken completely out of context. The actual article reveals the fact that Atef Abu Khater’s father says he picked up the illness due to the horrific conditions in Israel’s concentration camps for displaced Palestinians.
What the Free Press left out, is that the article says, “According to Ayed (Atef Abu Khater’s father), the harsh displacement environment is the reason for the deterioration of his son's health, as the family lives in a displacement tent amid inhumane conditions, surrounded by garbage and rodents, after being displaced from their homes due to the ongoing aggression on the Gaza Strip.”
In reality, what the Free Press left out is that, along with malnutrition, Atef Abu Khater picked up a disease in an Israeli concentration camp that he was displaced into due to the genocide in Gaza.
Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa
Next, The Free Press attacks Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa, a child starved by the Israeli blockade.
It cites an apparently deleted video where it claims that his father said “his son’s health problems dated back to before the war’s start and included joint pain since age two”.
It also cited fabricated propaganda put out by the IDF that claims he “suffers from a genetic disease causing vitamin and mineral deficiencies”.
The video linked to in the piece seems to have been deleted, but I was able to find a video where Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa is crying and saying “I’m hungry, I’m really hungry” while the caption reads that “his, mother cries powerless to help”, something that would certainly not result from “vitamin and mineral deficiencies” or “joint pain”.
Karam Khaled Al-Jamal
Next, the Free Press lies about Karam Khaled Al-Jamal, a 27-year-old man has died of starvation from the Israeli blockade.
The Free Press cited an article from the Turkish news outlet Anadolu, which says that “Karam has suffered from muscular atrophy and partial paralysis since childhood—conditions that rendered his body unable to digest food”.
Yet again, this is completely out of context. What the article actually says is, :
A young Palestinian man, Karam Khaled al-Jamal, died in the Gaza Strip as a result of the complications of malnutrition caused by the Israeli starvation policy, after his family was unable to provide his therapeutic diet amid the worsening famine.
A medical source at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza told Anadolu Agency that al-Jamal was admitted to the hospital in critical condition after suffering from a severe deterioration in malnutrition.
He pointed out that the 26-year-old al-Jamal needed special food care that was not available in light of the current crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Karam, who had been suffering from muscular dystrophy and paralysis since childhood, was displaced with his family from the city of Rafah in southern Gaza to the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, after the intensification of Israeli shelling on their areas.
There, his suffering began to grow silently, away from the hustle and bustle of war.
He needed a special diet based on ground fruits, due to his health condition, which made his body unable to digest food normally.
Regarding his suffering, his uncle Mohammed Al-Jamal said: "Karam lived for 26 years on a special diet based on ground fruits, and we provided him with everything despite his illness, and he was in stable health. But after displacement and famine, we are no longer able to provide even the most basic food needs."
He told Anatolia: "Everything has disappeared. No fruit, no electricity to run the blender, no food that can be digested. We had to change his diet, and his body began to collapse day by day. We watched him suffer in front of our eyes and we were helpless.
Yet again, this context was left out of the Free Press article.
Osama Al-Raqab
Finally, The Free Press lies about Osama Al-Raqab 5-year-old suffering from severe malnutrition.
The Free Press writes that, “None of the reports mentioned the fact that Osama also suffers from cystic fibrosis—the detail one could learn without even having to read in Arabic, as the information is readily available in English-language reports like this AP story.”
Yet again, The Free Press takes the AP story out of context. What the story actually says is:
Osama al-Raqab’s cystic fibrosis has worsened since the start of the war. Lack of meat, fish and enzyme tablets to help him digest food meant repeated hospital visits and long bouts of chest infections and acute diarrhea, says his mother, Mona. His bones poke through his skin. Osama, 5, weighs 20 pounds (9 kilos) and can hardly move or speak. Canned food offers him no nutrition.
“With starvation in Gaza, we only eat canned lentils,” his mother says. “If the borders remain closed, we will lose that too.”
Again, this context was left out of the Free Press article.
Pictured Above: Osama Al-Raqab suffering from severe malnutrition.
More Genocide Denial.
While The Free Press attempts to claim that starving Gazan civilians were actually suffering from disabilities, what their own sources show is that the genocidal blockade is affecting the most vulnerable of Palestinian society in Gaza first, as all starvation blockades do.
As writer Caitlin Johnstone said in response to the “Free Press” piece, “This argument is exactly the same as starting a fire in a crowded building and then claiming you couldn't be guilty of murder by arson because most of the people who died in the fire were handicapped and elderly individuals who couldn't escape quickly enough”.
As if lying about Israel starving civilians wasn’t bad enough, the Free Press article takes it even further and denies the Gaza genocide’s most well-documented atrocity.
The article cited the Zionist think tank Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), saying, “Last month, the NCRI released a 35-page report about how the GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) became the target of ‘narrative assault’ that alleged it was ‘systematically murdering civilians’The report traces those claims back to Hamas-run news agencies and anonymous social media accounts—and yet they were picked up by many top outlets, including BBC, Haaretz, and the Associated Press.”
This is just a blatant lie. In fact the Haaretz piece mentioned here cites IDF soldiers admitting to opening fire at civilians at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “aid sites”.
One admitted, “It's a killing field, where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire”.
Another admitted, “I was at a similar event. From what we heard, more than ten people were killed there. When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.”
This has been backed up by Anthony Aguilar, a whistleblower who previously worked with UG Solutions, the American mercenary firm hired to guard the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites.
Aguilar said, “The actions on the sites — escalation of force, no standard operating procedures to dictate that, no rules of engagement provided to the armed contractors on the ground, the indiscriminate use of force, lethal and nonlethal, against unarmed civilians. I want to make that clear. We aren’t there on the distribution sites defending ourselves against Hamas. We are using indiscriminate force, targeting civilians, escalation of force that goes far beyond the measures of appropriate, against an unarmed, starving population.”
Similarly, Nick Maynard, an Oxford-based gastrointestinal surgeon working in Gaza has testified that “snipers appear to be targeting body parts including genitals and legs near the controversial US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) food aid collection points in southern and central Gaza”.
Maynard told the Telegraph newspaper that “The medical teams here have also been seeing a clear pattern of people being shot in certain body parts (at the GHF sites) on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals, which seems to indicate deliberate targeting”.
He went on to say, “These are mainly from the militarised distribution points, where starving civilians are going to try and get food but then report getting targeted by Israeli soldiers or quadcopters”.
The Telegraph wrote :
Prof Maynard called the distribution sites “death traps”, saying he has mostly operated on young teenage boys who were trying to retrieve food for their families.
“A twelve-year-old boy I was operating on died from his injuries on the operating table – he had been shot through the chest,” said Prof Maynard.
Finally, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) recently put out a lengthy report based on their sources on the ground, exposing the aid massacres at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites.
The report wrote, “MSF teams became so accustomed to the influx of wounded following each distribution that they began monitoring the GHF’s social media — used to announce site openings — to ensure that medical teams were in place ahead of time. MSF staff described watching crowds move up the road, carrying white sacks to carry food grabbed from the GHF boxes. MSF’s nurse activity manager recalled the unmistakable link between distributions and injury.”
The MSF nurse activity manager was quoted in the report saying, “I see the roads get busy. I hear the hollering and heckling. I see people on carts with bags of food — then the injured begin arriving, almost at the same time. I have patients with gunshot wounds who are literally carried in on the same plastic bags they used to collect food”.
Finally, the article blatantly lies, writing “the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israeli and U.S. officials created to prevent aid from falling into the terrorist group’s hands.”
In reality, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation claim that Hamas looted aid has been fully debunked, even by American and Israeli sources.
The New York Times reported that, “the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations” and Reuters reported that “An internal U.S. government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies”.
In reality, the aid looting was done by the Israeli armed gang led by Yasser Abu Shabab with support from the IDF.
As the Financial Times reported, “These gangsters (led by Yasser Abu Shabab ) act, humanitarian officials and Palestinian transporters allege, with the tacit permission of the Israeli military: what a UN memo seen by the Financial Times called ‘the passive, if not active benevolence’ of the Israel Defense Forces”.
One UN official told the paper, “These guys are probably the only people in Gaza who can get 100 yards from an Israeli tank or Israeli soldiers without being shot”.
The Free Press has yet again shown itself to be a vile Holocaust-denial outlet that knowingly lies to cover up the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova will one day be remembered for the article they wrote as Genocidal propagandists who intentionally lied to cover up the modern-day Holocaust.
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One slim bright spot? The United Methodist Church has voted to officially divest from Israel. Interestingly, or sadly, per Mondoweiss, it's the first church in the world to do this. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/08/united-methodist-church-divests-from-israel-bonds/
Netanyahu and his gang of thieves have openly advocated for starving Gaza’s. You can read it in their vile comments! How can that be denied? Israel doesn’t deserve to exist anymore!