The real story is not Alaa Abd el-Fattah. It is Israel paralysing aid to Gaza

As the new year dawned, the gaze of UK media pivoted predictably to domestic theatre: a row over the foreign secretary ordering an urgent review into alleged “information failures” in the case of British Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah. 

The case hinges on the contention that senior officials were unaware of his past social media posts, which date back to 2010, before allowing him to settle in the UK. It made for familiar headlines: outrage over old tweets, elite embarrassment, and the machinations of Westminster.

Viewed in isolation, this might read as bureaucratic theatre: civil servants blindsided, ministers on the defensive, journalists circling for scoops. But zoom out, well beyond the soundbites and 24-hour churn, and the spectacle reeks of what Noam Chomsky famously described as manufactured consent - a diversion designed to make the public fixate on procedural minutiae, while far greater violence and suffering goes underreported and unchallenged.

While British news outlets obsess over social media posts and internal briefings, Israel has moved to ban or suspend 37 major international humanitarian organisations - including globally recognised groups such as Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, Care, World Vision and the Norwegian Refugee Council - from operating in the occupied Palestinian territories unless they comply with onerous new requirements. 

Critics argue these rules will cripple humanitarian access in Gaza, a territory already devastated by years of war.

This is not a technical adjustment. It is a policy decision with catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Many of these organisations provide essential services - medical care, food distribution, water and sanitation support - in a region where civilians have endured months of bombardment, blockade and infrastructure collapse. 

Amid winter rains and freezing conditions, the decision to sever these lifelines is more than an inconvenience: it threatens lives.

Global condemnation

The new Israeli requirements being imposed on NGOs - including disclosure of extensive staff details - are so stringent that many aid agencies have warned they are effectively impossible to meet without endangering their workers and violating data-protection obligations. 

Despite widespread international condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union and other foreign ministers urging unfettered humanitarian access, media coverage in the UK has largely relegated these developments to the margins.

Turn off the BBC panel shows for a moment and consider what is happening in Gaza right now. An enclave already shattered by repeated Israeli assaults and blockade now faces significant restrictions on humanitarian assistance, as winter storms worsen conditions and sanitation systems have collapsed. 

The real story today is unfolding in shattered hospitals, severed aid convoys, flooded shelters, frozen tents, and the eyes of families who know war, hunger and loss

Children who survived siege and shelling now risk respiratory infections, disease and malnutrition - conditions that kill far more slowly than a bomb, but are no less brutal. Families are struggling to keep warm in unheated tents, while relying on shrinking aid deliveries, and watching as the organisations that once helped them are forced out.

In that context, is Abd el-Fattah really the big story? Or has it been elevated - consciously or otherwise - to absorb public oxygen that should instead be devoted to the ongoing humanitarian disaster unfolding under the world’s watch?

This pattern is familiar. Western media have long exhibited editorial myopia: stories are prioritised not according to human harm, but rather according to proximity, political theatre, and the ease of framing a narrative that reinforces hostility to Muslims fleeing persecution.

A cabinet scramble over an activist’s Twitter history is digestible, relatable and familiar - even when it bears little relation to ongoing human suffering. Meanwhile, the removal of frontline aid workers from one of the world’s most acute humanitarian disasters barely registers, beyond a few paragraphs.

Shifting focus

Make no mistake: the suspension of these NGOs is not an abstract administrative dispute. It is a policy that will reduce the flow of food, medicine, shelter and basic services to people who have already lost everything. The ban follows other restrictions - including on Unrwa, the primary provider of services to Palestinian refugees - that have already weakened vital infrastructure.

Back in Westminster, the political class debates leaks, tweets and who knew what when. It is as if a theatrical fog is deliberately cast over not just Gaza, but the structural causes that make events there so dire: decades of occupation, blockade, and repeated offensives that have shattered infrastructure and lives, amid an international system that increasingly normalises conditions of deprivation rather than confronting them.

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The problem isn’t fundamentally that the Abd el-Fattah story exists. It is that it has been amplified at the expense of coverage, scrutiny and sustained engagement with the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Collective attention is thus steered towards what is comfortable and domestically framed, and away from what is uncomfortable, complex and contrary to western policy choices. But Gaza is not a distant story of unfamiliar suffering; it is a testament to what happens when power goes unchallenged and its human costs go underreported. 

Ignoring the crisis in Gaza amounts to complicity in these ongoing horrors, which deserve much more than intermittent coverage sandwiched between Westminster political gossip.

If western media wants to inform rather than distract, challenge rather than placate, and bear witness rather than broadcast spectacle, then news outlets must shift their focus to the undeniable catastrophe unfolding across the occupied Palestinian territories.

The real story today is unfolding in shattered hospitals, severed aid convoys, flooded shelters, frozen tents, and the eyes of families who know war, hunger and loss. Their stories are far more consequential than a row over old tweets.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Middle East Eye.