A Gaza photographer who was prominently accused of creating propaganda for Hamas has denied staging his photo and says he is not affiliated with the terror group.
Anas Zayed Fteiha has been at the center of a firestorm since Tuesday, when the popular German tabloid Bild published an article accusing him of deliberately using staged or misleading images to amplify the narrative of Israeli-caused suffering, particularly hunger, and citing content from his personal social media accounts as evidence of anti-Israel bias. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung also questioned the authenticity of photos from Gaza.
Two wire services said in response that they would cease using his work. Pro-Israel activists and Israeli officials, meanwhile, have seized on the articles’ claims to show that accusations of an Israeli-directed famine in the Strip are a fabrication authored by Hamas. Citing the allegations, President Isaac Herzog said at a press conference Wednesday, “We urge the world not to fall for Hamas’s lies.”
In particular, Israel advocates have circulated a photo in which Fteiha is seen crouching with his camera in front of a group of children waving empty pots, ostensibly to receive aid, but with no food visible in the frame.
But on Thursday, Fteiha defended the photo on Instagram, said he did not stage his work, and called the accusation that he is affiliated with Hamas “ridiculous.”
His defense came the day after Fake Reporter, an Israeli organization that investigates disinformation online, wrote a series of (Hebrew) posts on X casting doubt on the accuracy of posts that approvingly cited the Bild report.
“The photo they published to distort me is entirely real,” Fteiha wrote in Arabic. “It was taken during the filming of a documentary documenting the famine in Gaza, as children were scrambling for food or water. Everything in it was real, not staged or directed. I was doing my journalistic work honestly and honorably, and I didn’t direct any scene or ask anything from anyone.”
He added, “I work as a photojournalist with the Turkish Anadolu Agency. I am not affiliated with any other party, and I work for no one but the truth.”
Fteiha’s post is the latest entry in a years-long debate over whether to trust photos coming out of Gaza. Further complicating matters is the fact that Israel has not permitted foreign or Israeli journalists to enter Gaza independently since the start of the war triggered by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in southern Israel — except through rare, IDF-guided visits — meaning the work of local photographers is the principal source of images from the war-torn enclave.
That argument has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks as photos of emaciated Gazan children have been featured on the front pages of newspapers, and gone viral online, amid a global outcry over the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Such photos have been used to illustrate what humanitarian groups describe as deepening starvation in the enclave.
Israel denies the allegations of widespread starvation and has said it makes efforts to allow sufficient aid into Gaza. But facing heavy international pressure, the government recently increased the flow of supplies, after having barred aid altogether for 11 weeks between March and May. And government officials have pointed to several photos that, they say, are missing essential context and paint a skewed picture of the situation to smear Israel.
The reports in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild appeared to bolster that case. Süddeutsche Zeitung cited media sources and Gerhard Paul, a photography expert who has studied images from Israel and Gaza for 25 years, to argue that Hamas propaganda and biased reporting shape much of the photo coverage coming out of Gaza.
Journalist Christopher Resch of Reporters Without Borders told the paper that “little gets past Hamas” of what reporters are able to share from the ground — while adding that photographers providing subjects with certain instructions to frame an image is an acceptable practice, “so long as it roughly reflects reality.”
In addition to focusing on the photo of Fteiha, Bild included screenshots from his social media, including a depiction of him above the words “Free Palestine,” and another that is captioned, “Fuck Israel.”
“Beware of fake news,” Israel’s official X account posted on Tuesday above a screenshot of the Bild article and the photo of Fteiha, saying the papers’ reporting reveals how “Hamas uses… staged or selectively framed media to manipulate global opinion.”
“With Hamas controlling nearly all media in Gaza, these photographers aren’t reporting, they’re producing propaganda,” the post added.
In response to the allegations, the German Press Agency and Agence France-Presse told Bild they would no longer work with Fteiha and stressed their careful vetting of photographers and their reputations, while Reuters stated that its photos “meet the standards of accuracy, independence, and impartiality.”
But on Wednesday night, Fake Reporter disputed the Bild report, writing that the issue at hand is a “sensitive discussion that inflames passions, but that also needs to be based on facts.”
The group noted that an image that pro-Israel voices have attributed to Fteiha, which graced the cover of Time magazine, was actually taken by a different photographer. (See X post below.) And it said the claim that the children in the photo were not at an aid site is “inaccurate.”
“From our examination, one can see, in the same place, an abundance of documentation of food being distributed and prepared,” the group wrote. It posted photos and video from the same location and day, as well as on other days, showing food being doled out.
Fake Reporter asked whether the photo was a “complete lie” and wrote, “As of yet, there is no proof of that. Just the opposite. Different documentation from differing angles shows that this is a real food distribution point, where food has been given out consistently throughout recent weeks, as well as on that very day.”
This is at least the second time Bild has been at the center of discourse over how the war in Gaza is reported. A pair of aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been accused of taking a highly classified document ostensibly detailing Hamas’s priorities and tactics in hostage negotiations from the IDF’s military intelligence database and leaking it to Bild last year.
Anadolu, the Turkish agency that has featured Fteiha’s work, also took aim at the Bild article in a post on X, but focused on criticizing the tabloid’s ethics. It did not mention Fteiha directly.