Starving Children in Gaza Stirs World Conscience

It has taken a man made famine brought on by Israeli bombardments and blockades of food and essential supplies to Gaza, to stir a collective conscience and urge countries like the UK and the United States to finally demand that Benjamin Netanyahu end the destruction of Gaza that began in retaliation for a Hamas attack on Jewish settlements in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The indiscriminate bombings, the wiping out of thousands of its civilians, the eradication of generations of families, the images upon images of bodies in shrouds, and the living crying in desperation while standing amid the rubble of their homes didn’t have the same impact on world leaders and policy makers all this time, even though international aid agencies, UN officials and peace activists have been alerting the world to the grim contours of genocide, and the extermination of an entire population of Palestinians from their homeland.

Now, even the war’s staunchest advocates who believe in the “justness” of the Israeli response have been moved by images of starving children staring emptily towards a camera,  into threatening Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu with serious consequences if he doesn’t end the war.

Images of starving children that is changing the tide

This will not be the first time that a world community inured and desensitised to the horrors of war has suddenly taken notice. And once more, it is images of starving children that are changing the tide.

We all remember Kim Phuc, the Napalm Girl running naked down a road in Vietnam in 1972 with her back on fire, evoking outrage among the American public; or Sharbat Gul, the Afghan Girl in a refugee camp inside Pakistan with her green eyes burning through the cover urging us to end the Afghan war in 1985; or, similarly, the Aleppo Boy, Omran Daneesh who was covered in blood and dust, sitting with stunned, big eyes in the back of an ambulance in 2016 brought the horrors of war home to those watching with both physical distance and emotional detachment.

We also remember  the little three year old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi whose lifeless body washed upon a Turkish shore in 2015 after a boatload of people escaping the war there capsised, prompting European countries to open their borders to those trying to flee; just as vividly as the images starving children in Ethiopia in the famine of the 1980s led to the creation of one of the biggest charity events, and pop music hits of 1985, with the creation of Band Aid and its multi-musician song “Do They Know its Christmas” which still collects royalties in support of the charity that helps feed millions of children every year, even forty years after its release.

We remember South African photographer Kevin Carter’s searing image of a vulture perched besides a curled up, starving child in South Sudan in 1994 that began a debate on the need and role of photographers – to intervene and help or just bear witness.

So, again, the question is of why we are moved by images of starvation, when we can quite comfortably watch the devastation of a place and the deaths of its people with a sense of both physical distance and emotional detachment? The answer is perhaps simpler than we realise.

War coverage is often dominated by major mass media outlets with the resources – both financial and manpower- to send out into the field, and the capability of coverage with immediacy. Yet governed by editors who are either under pressure from the management, or are under pressure from the government to stick to an official line to “manufacture consent”, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman theorised, consistently find themselves unable and/or unwilling to show images that reflect the brutal and devastating realities of conflict.

Coverage of war on television more often than not takes on dimensions of a video game

The recent expose on the BBC’s pro-Israel slant in its coverage of the Gaza war, even as images of horrific destruction circulated on social media, is a case in point. These are the very types of images that advocates of war in the military-government-corporate media machine want kept away from the public.

Coverage of war on television more often than not takes on dimensions of a video game that leans towards “infotainment.” War reportage is accompanied by visuals that simulate video game formats- satellite images of far away targets, blips on a radar screen, drone footage taken from high above and elaborate graphics.

Live reports from the ground are shot at a distance from devastation, grief and loss are kept blurred and invisible because the images have the power to disturb and trigger viewers, and possibly distract their attention from the justifications being proffered for violence. The coverage, as media scholar Daya Thussu argues is therefore, both virtual and bloodless.

However, the voyeuristic comfort of watching war from a distance changes when living children with hungry eyes and emaciated bodies come into the picture. No one can argue that children deserve to suffer, no matter what the context or catalyst of conflict. Children represent innocence, helplessness and most importantly, hope for a future. Images of children suffering therefore encourage a sense of moral clarity across cultures and ideologies precisely because their suffering is uncomfortable to see and cognitively dissonant to comprehend in ways that images of silent, lifeless, dead adults are not.

For many Jewish people around the world too, it has finally taken these horrific images to start speaking out against Israeli state policy against the Palestinians today. The rationalisation of Gaza’s destruction and Palestinian deaths as necessary collateral damage  has finally given way to increasing demands even within the Jewish community in and out of Israel to call an end to the war. After all, the pictures of starvation and depravation are reminiscent of similar ones that emerged out of the Holocaust that of 1945.

The public needs to ensure it views others pain from a position of compassion and involvement

Pictures of men, women and children, thin as rakes with skeletal bodies and hopeless eyes disbelieving even when they were finally liberated from Nazi extermination camps alive have left lifelong scars. Their conditions were described in graphic detail by renowned American journalist Edward R. Murrow. His reports, filled of detailed facts and his own emotional honesty would go on and fundamentally alter perspectives of American understanding of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities.

Now, that these images from Gaza have transcended the invisible barriers between social media, independent digital media, citizen journalism and mass media and we are moved to act, what next?  In her landmark essay on the impact of photographs in conflict, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag makes the point that while such images can create empathy and foster a degree of political awareness, they also risk turning tragedy into spectacle.

The public needs to ensure it views others pain from a position of compassion and involvement, not simply voyeurism by those of us who watch from the comfort of our homes in cities far away from the war.

Past experience tells us that despite the attention, children consistently continue to bear a disproportionate burden in conflicts and disasters worldwide. Gaza is no different from any of the other theatres of violence elsewhere, its children are no different from victims of any other war or calamity. And Gaza’s children deserve the same empathy, the same compassion, the same action and the same justice as any child anywhere else deserves.

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