Gaza Herald- As someone who holds both British and Egyptian identities and has spent over a decade providing pediatric care in Gaza, I have seen the devastating effects of war, siege, and abandonment on children. I have held infants dying from preventable illnesses, watched families grieve losses that should never have occurred. But what I am witnessing now is unprecedented, not just in its scale, but in the cold indifference of institutions that claim to value life, rights, and international law.
Over the past days, images of skeletal children, infants whose ribs protrude through thinning skin, and toddlers too weak to lift their heads have flooded mainstream media in the UK. These are the same children who, for months, have been screaming through the silence. And now, as if newly discovered, they have become headlines.
But for those of us in medicine, those who have stayed connected with doctors inside Gaza and sounded the alarm repeatedly, this catastrophe is not a surprise. It is the tragic consequence of months of inaction and a deliberate process of dehumanization a process aided by UK media platforms, protected by British government policy, and executed by a regime emboldened by impunity.
Complicity Through the Press
The horrifying images now circulating did not emerge in a vacuum. They are the outcome of a narrative that has been long cultivated and defended by British news outlets. These institutions helped normalize the starvation of Gaza by endlessly amplifying official justifications, by repeating phrases like “human shields,” “terrorist infrastructure,” and “no famine.” This language created a fog of denial, designed to desensitize the public and obscure the reality.
For nearly two years and with heightened intensity since late 2023, UK broadcasters and newspapers echoed official lines almost word for word. They portrayed an entire civilian population as complicit in violence, offering excuse after excuse to rationalize a brutal siege that deprived millions of food, water, medicine, and electricity.
This wasn’t impartial journalism. It was a kind of ideological scaffolding, supporting policies that resulted in widespread death and suffering. These narratives discredited eyewitness accounts from Palestinian doctors, aid workers, and human rights organizations. They allowed war crimes to go unchallenged. They silenced the pleas of desperate civilians, reducing a humanitarian crisis to a debate of false equivalence.
And now, as children die on camera, these same media outlets have shifted their tone, not out of principle, but in an attempt to preserve their credibility in the face of overwhelming evidence and mounting public outrage.
The Silence of Medical and Political Bodies
While Gaza’s health infrastructure disintegrated under bombing campaigns, the silence from British medical institutions was deafening. We watched in disbelief as hospitals in Gaza were attacked, surgical theatres destroyed, and medics killed all while professional bodies in the UK issued tepid statements or remained completely quiet. The ethical obligation to speak out was overtaken by fear of controversy.
We must not forget how, during this crisis, major British newspapers gave ample space to official spokespersons, while questioning or entirely excluding Palestinian healthcare workers. We must remember how respected publications printed speculative stories about alleged tunnels under hospitals, effectively branding medical facilities as military targets. And we must remember how some commentators dared to suggest that the suffering in Gaza was staged, as though children’s deaths were props in a propaganda war.
This is not impartiality it is racism. It is the devaluation of Palestinian life, the casual dismissal of Palestinian grief. It should not have required images of protruding ribs and sunken eyes to force recognition of Palestinian humanity.
Would this be the response if the starving children were British? Israeli? Ukrainian? The question answers itself. Palestinian children have long been seen as collateral, either erased from media coverage or portrayed as future threats rather than innocent lives.
British Hands Are Not Clean
The ongoing starvation of Gaza is not solely the result of Israeli military policy. It is a shared crime facilitated by British arms sales, by diplomatic protection, by a political class that refuses to call this what it is: genocide. It is the result of editors who surrendered journalistic integrity to state talking points, of medical associations that forgot their duty to protect life, of government leaders who continue to present this conflict as a balanced struggle between equals.
But there is no balance between the oppressor and the oppressed, between an occupying power and a besieged population. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate the violence.
We now see widespread recognition from global institutions that Gaza is experiencing catastrophic hunger. Humanitarian agencies have confirmed that children are dying from dehydration and malnutrition. Health experts have called Gaza the most dangerous place in the world for a child. Still, British officials drag their feet, and British institutions scramble to distance themselves from the consequences of their silence.
Yet accountability cannot stop at Israel’s borders. Every British institution that enabled this horror must answer for its role. Every newspaper that denied the truth, every university that silenced voices calling for Palestinian justice, every medical board that failed to speak up, these are not innocent bystanders. They are co-authors of this atrocity.
A System Built on Dehumanization
The starvation of Gaza’s children is not a failure of the system; it is the system. A system that weighs lives on a political scale, where Palestinian deaths are deemed acceptable losses. A system that must be dismantled, not rebranded.
The flood of media attention now cannot erase months of complicity. These images are not a turning point they are the moment of reckoning.
We cannot allow institutions to escape responsibility through performative outrage or superficial corrections. The people who helped make this possible must not be allowed to reinvent themselves as defenders of humanity now that the scale of suffering is too great to deny.
A Doctor’s Duty
As a pediatrician, I took an oath to protect life. That duty extends beyond the hospital ward; it demands that I speak out when systems are killing children. When families feed their babies boiled grass because there is nothing else. When infants die for lack of milk, clean water, or basic medical care, and when silence becomes collaboration.
It is not enough to grieve now that the world can see. We must confront the racism, the complicity, and the policies that allowed this to happen and ensure they can never be repeated.
Because if the people now mourning Gaza’s children are permitted to shape policy again, we have learned nothing. And more children will die.
By Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan
