The Daily Express and Daily Mail have been reported to their regulator, IPSO, after ignoring complaints about their misleading use of photographs accompanying articles alleging famine in Gaza.

The Daily Express published a full-page close-up photograph of a skeletal 18 month child, unfortunately afflicted by congenital illnesses,  on its front page with the headline “The suffering of little Muhammed shames us all”.

This photograph, from a series taken by a Gazan photographer, was used to illustrate and exemplify an alleged famine in Gaza, suggesting that children in Gaza generally were starving.  The accompanying article described the image as “encapsulating the ‘maelstrom of human misery’ gripping Gaza.”

This coverage was quickly followed by articles using similar photographs of the same child in other media including the Daily Mail, The Times, The Guardian and Sky News.

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has now reported the Daily Express and Daily Mail to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO.

Although the Express article mentioned that Muhammad was born with health problems affecting both his brain and muscle development, it shamelessly exploited this poor, sick, child with serious congenital illnesses to present a false image of general starvation.

The article in the Mail used a photograph of the same child with no reference to his medical condition.

The photographer is a journalist who specializes in photographing seriously ill, skeletal children in Gaza, together with their non-starving mother,  as can be seen on his Instragram account, and selling them to photographic agencies.

While the situation in Gaza is extremely difficult for the civilian population, who are undoubtedly suffering badly due to the war, the general population is not skeletal.  If the population were generally starving, groups of adults and children would have been photographed looking emaciated.

David Collier, the investigative journalist found that the child featured in the photographs published in the media suffered from congenital disorders and that his brother, aged 3, and mother were evidently not starving, as shown by contemporaneous photographs, including some that were cropped in the media to show poor baby Muhammad without his healthy, non-starving sibling.

UKLFI wrote to both the Express and the Mail but received no response, and so subsequently reported them to IPSO.

A spokesperson for UKLFI said “We requested that the Express and Mail clarify their articles on baby Muhammad, but they ignored our request to do so.  Instead they persisted with an antisemitic blood libel, similar to those circulating hundreds of years ago, implying that Jews are killing babies.  Therefore we have reported them to IPSO.”