Bari Weiss's Free Press Wants You to Know Some Kids Being Starved by Israel Were Already Sick

The Intercept

a day ago

Starving Palestinian children line up for meals at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Aug. 18, 2025. Photo: Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images
What killed Anne Frank?
The Nazis killed Anne Frank.
To suggest that any other cause was primary in her vastly premature death is tantamount to vile Holocaust denialism — which is why Holocaust denialists do indeed point out that Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
This is precisely the logic that Israel's apologists in the media have deployed in recent days when it comes to the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza. The right-wing Free Press published a story on Sunday, framed as an investigative exposé, revealing that at least 12 of the Palestinian children featured in viral images depicting the state of Israel-induced famine were not only starving, but … were also sick.
The supposed gotcha is that children with disabilities and preexisting health conditions, who cannot get the treatment and nutrition they need because of Israel's genocidal siege, are not representative of the population. And — the horror! — photographs of these non-representative children are prompting global outrage.
The idea is we are supposed to be less horrified by the fact that children with disabilities like cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis are starving to death under the deliberate siege policies of a wealthy, occupying nation-state and its backers.
The Free Press, helmed by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, is suggesting that in failing to either emphasize or mention the children's health conditions as well as the Israel-induced malnutrition that is killing them, Western media sources using the images are unfairly maligning Israel — despite the fact that it is Israel's genocidal actions that have brought the children to a condition of bare life. It is the very nature of genocide to involve the destruction of conditions necessary for sustaining life, such that sickness as well as direct slaughter destroys, in part or whole, the targeted population.
'This information does not change the fact that the children depicted in this story are suffering from malnutrition due to the difficulties they face accessing aid in Gaza, as reported,' a CNN spokesperson told the Free Press, after the publication informed the network that Hajjaj, a 6-year-old girl featured in a CNN story about starvation in Gaza, was not only starving but also had an 'esophagus condition.'
Founded in 2021 by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, the Free Press pitches itself as home for 'heterodox' thinking, but it has been a reliable platform for the anti-woke, anti-trans, and pro-Israel talking points of mainstream American conservatism. Weiss, who has dedicated her professional life to anti-Palestinian animus and unwavering support for Israel, is reportedly in talks with CBS's new parent company Skydance about buying the online outlet for $250 million.
The Free Press is actively stoking genocide denial, but it's not the first media organ to take this odious tack of minimization. In late July, the New York Times cravenly appended a lengthy editor's note and update on a story featuring the image of emaciated 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq to include the fact that he had other health issues 'affecting his brain and his muscle development.'
Even if Israel's siege were only leading to the death of Palestinians with preexisting health issues and disabilities, we would still have on our hands a case of intolerable, eugenic slaughter — as if Palestinian sick children's lives are worth less. Needless to say, Israel's project of genocide and ethnic cleansing takes aim at all Palestinians.
The Free Press goes as far as to admit, 'It's not that there isn't hunger in Gaza. There is.' It's a gross understatement. As is well documented and widely recognized, Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza. This has been made clear in both intent — as expressed by Israeli government ministers — and effect, as evident in the mounting starvation-based death toll of a reported 266 people from malnutrition-related causes, likely a significant underestimate.
Reports from health care workers and international humanitarian groups, the desperate direct pleas of thousands and thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and the exorbitant prices of barely available basic ingredients all confirm the same. Israeli troops, and perhaps security contractors hired by an Israeli-backed aid group, have killed over 1,400 Palestinians attempting to get food at aid sites since May. Palestinians continue to try to access these death traps daily, simply because there is not enough food elsewhere — all by Israeli design.
As the historian Adam Tooze pointed out in a recent newsletter, the purposeful starvation of Gaza by Israel is exceptional. There are 11 places in the world currently where more people are at serious risk of hunger than in Gaza, including Yemen and Sudan, but Tooze pointed out that Gaza is unique: 'Being the result of deliberate policy by a powerful state, commonly regarded as belonging to the exclusive club of 'advanced economies', the mass starvation in Gaza in the summer of 2025 is quite unlike that anywhere else in the world.'
Tooze added that, while around half of the populations of Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti are at risk of famine, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are. In Gaza, he writes, the 'risk of famine is total.'
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If a person can, after nearly two years of genocidal onslaught, witness the scenes and testimonies from Gaza — of which the images of these malnourished children are just a tiny slice — and find the main problem is that not enough people know that some of the most vulnerable in Israel's genocide have preexisting health conditions, then we are are not speaking from a framework of shared humanity.
I dare say there is nothing such a person could see of Palestinians suffering that would permit them to shift their worldview at this point, because the humanity of Palestinians has been a priori excluded from it.
The fact that the Free Press story's authors and publishers do not see that their claim is the modern-day equivalent to suggesting that Frank primarily died of typhus makes all too clear that they do not see Palestinians as fully human. It is a supremacist, eugenicist lens that is beneath contempt, yes, but also beneath debate.
A worldview that holds Israel's righteousness firmly at its center resists destabilization — even by images of systematically starved and slaughtered children and babies. After all, Zionist propaganda has for decades had to account for the fact that Israel maims, imprisons, and slaughters children. Images of dead Palestinian children and babies did not only start circulating in this genocidal phase of the ongoing Nakba.
A decade ago, the late Charles Krauthammer — a Zionist Washington Post columnist — wrote a column titled 'Moral clarity in Gaza,' praising Israel's actions during its 2014 Gaza assault, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians including over 500 children. Atrocity images circulated then, too, including photos of the mangled, limp frames of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach by Israeli missiles.
Krauthammer described the children as 'telegenically killed' — a line that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself then picked up to blame Hamas for using the 'telegenically dead.' Netanyahu admits that Israel's victims are often telegenic — young children tend to be — but relies on dehumanization of Palestinians so inflexible that even the worst scenes of massacred and starved babies can be consumed without compelling immediate action against Israel as génocidaires.
The Free Press's so-called corrections are a ghoulish reminder: It is not a problem of insufficient evidence, it is not a problem of knowledge, that continues to fuel, with support and funds, this genocide.