Thread by @prescottcraig

🧵THREAD: The Truth Behind the Express’s “Starving Child” Cover

📢 This is not a starving child.
The Daily Express used this image of a severely disabled boy — almost certainly suffering from spastic cerebral palsy— and falsely framed it as a symbol of famine in Gaza.

This is media manipulation at its most shameless.

What the Express didn’t show you: this photo is part of a wider set.

The same child is pictured here with his healthy, well-fed sibling. No signs of generalised famine. No emergency feeding stations. Just a selectively cropped story to provoke outrage.

The child’s condition is not due to acute starvation.
He shows signs of:

Muscle contracture
Limited motor control
Growth stunting
Likely spastic cerebral palsy
None of the key symptoms of famine-induced malnutrition (no oedema, no skin lesions, no kwashiorkor).

This is a child with a lifelong neurological disorder, possibly microcephaly or a form of cerebral palsy — a tragic reality made worse by displacement, but not proof of deliberate starvation.

And yet, media outlets have weaponised him for clicks.

Arabic outlets are running the same line: “Child Muhammad suffers from malnutrition.”

That may be partly true — he’s clearly in distress. But describing this as evidence of siege-induced famine is misleading and exploitative.

Getty’s own photos show a healthy child in the background — and yet he’s cropped or blurred out of every dramatic publication shot.

This wasn’t accidental. It’s narrative construction.

When media outlets frame a child with a congenital disability as a victim of state-induced starvation — while cropping out the healthy sibling — that’s not journalism.

That’s war porn.

And it shames those who actually fight for truth and for vulnerable people.