Gaza famine: We hold British institutions accountable for enabling this horror

Middle East Eye

2 days ago

I am a British-Egyptian paediatrician. I have travelled to Gaza for over a decade, working alongside local doctors and witnessing first-hand the impact of Israel's blockade and bombardment on children's health.
I know what it means to see preventable child death. But I have never in my lifetime witnessed this level of calculated cruelty, nor such cold complicity from those who claim to care about international law and children's rights.
For the past few days, the faces of starving children in Gaza have flooded the pages of British newspapers: emaciated infants with hollow eyes, toddlers too weak to cry, babies dying in their mothers' arms. It is as if the UK media suddenly discovered that children are being starved in Gaza.
But for those of us who work with children, who have spoken daily with doctors inside Gaza, who have begged governments and institutions to act for the last nine months, this horror is not news.
It is the inevitable outcome of a deliberate campaign of dehumanisation - sanctioned by the British mainstream media, shielded by the British government and carried out by an apartheid state with total impunity.
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Media complicity
The images now shocking the nation did not appear in a vacuum. They are the final chapter of a story that the UK media has helped write from the beginning.
Now that children are starving to death on camera, the very same outlets have begun to backtrack - not out of principle, but self-preservation
For 20 months - and especially since October 2023 - British newspapers, broadcasters and politicians have regurgitated Israeli government talking points almost verbatim: human shields, terrorist infrastructure, no famine, Hamas is hiding food, Israel is doing its best.
Every excuse has been offered to rationalise the collective punishment of two million people - half of them children.
These narratives were not harmless. They built the scaffolding of disbelief that allowed genocide to unfold before our eyes. They gave cover to Israeli war crimes.
They undermined the testimonies of Palestinian doctors, UN officials, human rights experts and ordinary civilians begging to be believed. They manufactured public consent for ethnic cleansing.
Now that children are starving to death on camera, the very same outlets have begun to backtrack - not out of principle, but self-preservation.
The tide of public opinion has turned. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide.
The World Health Organization warns of catastrophic hunger. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef) says Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, British institutions are scrambling to rewrite their role.
But we must not let them.
Institutional racism
We must remember how British editors platformed Israeli spokespeople while silencing Palestinian medics; how papers like The Times and The Telegraph printed baseless stories about tunnels under hospitals, smearing paediatric units as terrorist command centres; how some columnists questioned whether Palestinians really lacked food or were staging the suffering.
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We must remember that while Gaza's healthcare system collapsed under relentless bombing, our own medical bodies stayed largely silent - too afraid of controversy to speak against the starvation of children.
And we must call this what it is: racism.
It should never have taken visible bones and distended bellies to convince British journalists that Palestinians are human beings.
The starvation of children is not more tragic now because it is photogenic; it is tragic because it was always avoidable and always justified only because of who those children were.
Would this be happening if they were Israeli children? Ukrainian children? British children? Of course not. But Palestinian lives, and especially Palestinian children, have been treated as disposable - either invisible or demonised.
For months, Israeli officials openly stated their intent to deprive Gaza of food, fuel, water and medicine. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said they were fighting "human animals". Senior politicians called for a second Nakba.
And yet, the UK media pretended not to hear.
We have colleagues in Gaza who told me in March 2025 that they had nothing left to eat. They were performing surgery without anaesthetic, feeding their children boiled grass, watching infants die of dehydration and wasting.
We relayed these accounts to journalists, to international agencies, to professional bodies here in Britain.
But too often they wanted "balance". They wanted to wait for "independent verification". They would quote an Israeli military spokesperson, but not a Palestinian paediatrician who just watched three babies die.
This is what racism looks like in institutional form: the demand for impossible evidence from the colonised, while treating every word of the coloniser as fact.
Moment of reckoning
The images now flooding our media are not a turning point; they are a reckoning.
Because it is not just Israel that is starving these children; it is the UK government that continues to arm Israel, host its war criminals and block calls for a ceasefire.
The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system; it is the system - a system that deems some lives worth mourning and others worth erasing
It is every editor who played stenographer to Israel's occupation. It is every medical institution that remained neutral while Gaza hospitals were bombed. It is every British leader who repeats the lie that this is a war between equals.
The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system; it is the system - a system that deems some lives worth mourning and others worth erasing, a system that needs to be torn down, not rebranded.
So yes, show the images. Show the world what has been done. But do not look away from the people and structures that made this possible. Demand accountability - not just from Israel, but from every British institution that enabled this horror.
As a paediatrician, I swore an oath to protect life. That means speaking out when children are starved to death with the world's approval. That means confronting the racism at the heart of this silence.
And that means ensuring that those now weeping for Gaza's children never again have the power to decide who lives and who dies.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye