Long-time New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, by his own description, has “criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it,” and argued “that it’s time to end this war.”
With that goal in mind, he recently asserted that Gazans are starving, and he saw fit to dedicate the bulk of his allotted column space in the paper to a photograph of a Gazan boy who died in Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
According to “the nurses and other doctors” who were at that hospital that day, the boy’s death was due to “complications from malnutrition.”
Whether one of the complications informing the child’s malnutrition might have been some pre-existing serious medical condition isn’t known, and Mr. Kristof doesn’t supply, or didn’t seem to make an effort to elicit, any more pertinent information.
But other, earlier reports of dead or dying Gazan children, at least in responsible media, took pains to note, at least in passing, that serious diseases—in one case, cerebral palsy; in another, cystic fibrosis—had played significant roles in those unfortunate deaths.
Anyone with a heart—and, as per Chazal, that includes any Jew, as we are rachamanim—cannot but be anguished by the thought of a child, or anyone, lacking adequate food or water, much less dying as a result of such deprivation.
But it is not cynical to note that alarming claims that Gazans were starving have been a mainstay of UN statements and media reportage since February, and yet, despite a constant stream of communications from Gazans to the world at large, decisive evidence of malnutrition in non-disease-afflicted people in the territory seems to be nonexistent.
To be sure, Gazan adults and children are in danger’s way—the result of the truly cynical intention of their erstwhile government, Hamas. And there may in fact be many Gazans who are experiencing shortages of food items. But, photographs of the territory’s residents show not gaunt, emaciated waifs but people who seem, at the very least, adequately fed.
That is not conclusive, of course. But it is of interest.
It’s not greatly surprising that Mr. Kristof is not given to investigating further the details of the hospital workers’ claims. His only interest, by his own admission, is simply to try to halt the Israeli effort, which, of course, is to totally uproot Hamas (a group, it should be noted, that the columnist has himself condemned in the strongest terms) by sending its leaders to their ultimate just deserts.
And so, he chooses to offer readers a photograph that, he explains, has “a persuasive power greater than my words” and which he intends as “a reminder to us all of what’s at stake.”
In reality, though, it’s the cheapest of cheap shots.
One might well wonder whether, had Mr. Kristof been dispatching reports or writing opinion pieces during World War II, he might have chosen to offer the American public a photograph of a dead German child, one of the approximately 305,000 German civilians killed in Allied bombings, as a high-minded effort to persuade readers of the need to pressure the US to reach a truce with the Third Reich, rather than defeat it. We are grateful that he wasn’t.
War, tragically, engulfs innocents; it always has and always will. But the blame for those civilian casualties always ultimately lies entirely with those who fomented the war. Every casualty of the war in Gaza is a victim of Hamas.
I have a suggestion for Mr. Kristof. If he truly wishes to help bring about the quickest possible end to the war and to “remind us all of what’s at stake,” he might consider dedicating a future column to describing the murderous hatred of some grown Gazans, like Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the barbarians who started the war in Gaza.
And, in the remaining space, offer a photo of one of the Israeli youngsters who were savagely slaughtered in the October 7 expression of Arab malevolence.
That would remind us of what’s really at stake.
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