When The New York Times published an image in the summer of 2025 featuring an emaciated boy in Gaza, it immediately was seized upon by anti-Israel activists, eager to use the photograph to promote their allegations of “famine.”

However, it was soon revealed that the boy, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, was not starving, but suffering from cerebral palsy, and the newspaper soon issued an editor’s note setting the record straight.

That did not stop the Pulitzer Prize committee from bestowing an award upon the photographer, Saher Alghorra, for his photo-advocacy, or Global News, which eagerly provided a fawning report on the topic, where it promoted opinions as fact.

The May 7 broadcast, “Palestinian photographer wins Pulitzer Prize for Gaza war images,” featured host Dawna Friesen – who just weeks earlier, spread the claim of dead journalists in Gaza – began by lamenting to viewers that “what’s happening in Gaza isn’t making headlines anymore,” before proceeding to do its best to rectify that situation.

Watch the full segment below:

She claimed that “more than 200 (journalists) have been killed in Gaza” during the war, neglecting to mention that according to investigations, most of them were active Palestinian terrorists, rather than innocent civilians, and that many of them could not reasonably be called journalists at all.

In the report, correspondent Redmond Shannon – also no stranger to promoting aggressively anti-Israel narratives in his reporting – claimed that the photograph in question depicted “last year’s food shortages caused by Israel restricting aid deliveries.”

Here, Shannon appeared to forget that his job is to report the news, not his own apparent opinions.

As Israel repeatedly reminded those who were willing to listen, the country imported enormous amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and pointed out that there was never any limit to the amount of food that could enter the territory.

Moreover, not once in his report did Shannon admit that the image used by The New York Times featured a boy with a serious pre-existing condition which would have explained his emaciated state, particularly in contrast with his family, who appeared well-fed, showing that food was hardly inaccessible to them.

It is nothing short of scandalous that the Pulitzer Prize would be awarded to an individual whose grossly misleading image was used in a thinly-veiled propaganda campaign against the Jewish State. As Israel’s consul general to Toronto and Western Canada, Idit Shamir noted, “one of the oldest lies in human history, that Jews deliberately harm children, is award-worthy journalism.”

When Shannon’s report concluded – after he also repeated the unfounded claim of 200 dead journalists in Gaza – Friesen shook her head and said “such powerful pictures,” indicating that her coverage of the Middle East appeared to be coloured, not necessarily by facts or details, but by pure emotion.

False, misleading and fantastical claims coming from Gaza’s so-called “journalists” are nothing new, and allegations of “starvation,” as well as “genocide,” while widely-spread by anti-Israel activists and their supporters in the news media, have been repeatedly disproven, but that has not stopped them from being repeated ad nauseum.