Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters Sunday that Israel may sue the New York Times for defamation over a front-page photo that falsely purported to show a starving Palestinian child in Gaza.
Netanyahu reviewed three such photos, noting that in each case the child in question suffered from some other illness, often a genetic one, and that the adults and other children pictured nearby were well-fed.
He said that the false claim that Israelis were hurting children had roots in medieval libels against Jews, which historically had been a prelude to attacks against Jewish communities.
Netanyahu said:
The third one is the most celebrated one. This is a New York Times cover photo, it’s on the front page, of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub and his mother. Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub is suffering from a genetic illness which we’re familiar with. It’s called cerebral palsy. His mother is well-fed and his brother is healthy. I’m looking right now into the possibility of a governmental suit against the New York Times because this is outrageous. Of course, the correction was postage-size — I don’t know where it was buried — but this is outrageous. These are the three most celebrated photos and they’re all fake. It’s the kind of malignant lies that were leveled at the Jewish people in the Middle Ages. We won’t suffer. We won’t allow it to go unchallenged. And this is the purpose of this press conference. I hope that you open your eyes to a simple fact: Hamas lies.
Netanyahu also defended Israel’s military operations in Gaza, noting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was surging aid into Gaza, while working to remove Hamas entirely and to free the remaining Israeli hostages.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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