The New York Times issued a correction on Tuesday, after it published a front-page image last week of an emaciated child to illustrate widespread hunger in Gaza without noting that the boy suffers from health problems that predate the ongoing war.

“Children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented,” the newspaper said in a written statement. “We recently ran a story about Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammad Zakaria el-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition.

“We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems. This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation,” it said.

A correction was added to the article accompanying the photo online. The statement was posted on X to The New York Times’ public relations account — which has some 89,000 followers; it was not posted to The New York Times’ main X account, which has 55 million.

The photograph, which dominated the Times’ front page on Friday, shows the boy, visibly malnourished, in the arms of his mother, Hedaya. She told the newspaper, according to its caption, that Mohammed “was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition.”

Images of al-Mutawaq also appeared in Sky News, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and the Times of London, with similar captions, some of which — including in The New York Times’ online edition — also claimed without clear evidence that “Mohammed’s father was killed last year when he went to seek food.”

An image of the child in his mother’s arms also occupied the entire front page of the UK’s Daily Express newspaper last week, with the headline: “FOR PITY’S SAKE STOP THIS NOW: The suffering........

© The Times of Israel