Who is Alaa Al-Najjar?
According to Hamas, she is a doctor and the mother of nine children who were killed in an Israeli air strike on Friday (May 23), while she was on duty at Nasser hospital in southern Gaza. When she heard of the strike, she ran to her demolished home in Khan Younis, only to discover the charred bodies of her children. Her husband and one child survived with serious injuries.
This tragic story made headlines over the weekend, with heartbreaking photos of tiny wrapped bodies, crying women, and old family pictures of the adorable children. While we don’t doubt their tragic death, we wonder why the mother herself did not appear in any photo from the emergency room, the site, the funeral, or the family photos that showed only the father.
In fact, media uncritically or deliberately spread old and fake photos, misidentified the husband’s niece as the mother, and eventually — after three days — published a photo purporting to show the mother not in a doctor’s coat but veiled behind a Niqab.
Despite what this photo caption says, it does not show Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, the mother of children killed in an airstrike.
The photo in @guardian actually shows al-Najjar’s niece (left) and brother-in-law with an as yet unidentified woman. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/2yGSHMyh6k
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 25, 2025
Misleading Photos
One of the first pictures that circulated after the incident was the dramatic photo of a screaming woman holding the wrapped body of a baby, surrounded by a crying boy and a man who tries to console her.
The painful picture, tragically reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta, undoubtedly moved some news editors. And because they needed a photo to go with the story of Alaa Al-Najjar, they didn’t bother checking its date, which goes back to December 2023:
Meanwhile, many outlets — including CNN and The Guardian — ran with Getty/Anadolu visuals of the husband’s niece visiting him in hospital, mistakenly identifying her as the mother.
The same woman appears in a Reuters interview, describing her aunt’s horrible experience. Other Reuters interviews feature the husband’s sister and brother. But his wife — the mother of the nine dead children — is not interviewed or seen anywhere.
She finally appeared on Sunday (May 25), in a Reuters photo said to show her wearing a Niqab. No one in the global agency seemed to wonder about it, but an Arab Affairs expert told HonestReporting the strict religious appearance was “very odd” given she was allowed to practice medicine and become a pediatrician.
The masking of Alaa’s identity was also apparent in a photo showing a woman whose face cannot be seen as she leans over children’s bodies. Another photo showing almost identical children’s bodies, with an unidentified woman crying above them, was most probably AI-generated:
And the absence of the mother from family photos that circulated online should have raised a few eyebrows:
Related Reading: ‘14,000 Babies Will Die’: How the UN Invented a Blood Libel — and the Media Ran With It
Believing Hamas
The death of any child is a tragedy that cannot be minimized, and there is no doubt about the death of Al-Najjar’s children. We simply point at holes in Hamas’ narrative that should have been questioned by any journalist who wishes to get to the bottom of the story.
In Gaza, media crews usually get footage very quickly — especially when many people are killed, and when grieving family members are at the center of the narrative. So it’s at least worth asking why photos have been manipulated, and where the real mother is.
It’s also important to ask why all the sources of this sad story are secondary at best (the relatives) or agenda-driven at worst (Hamas Health Ministry officials).
Finally, any journalist should have asked why Al-Najjar’s house was targeted, given that the IDF has made clear that it targets terrorists, not the civilians they hide behind.
When such questions are not asked, the result is irresponsible reporting that takes Hamas’ word as gospel and does further injustice to those it uses as human shields. It also exploits the faith of news consumers who believe they get all the facts from a reliable source.
But when media outlets don’t even question the false blood libel they helped spread last week about 14,000 Gazan babies who were expected to die from hunger within two days — why would anyone expect them to doubt anything?
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