Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations, made an embarrassing faux pas on Saturday when she attempted to pass off a photo of a Gaza girl as that of a Kashmiri.
Lodhi was responding to Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj’s attack on Pakistan at the United Nations General Assembly, calling it a “pre-eminent export factory for terror”.
Exercising the right of reply, Lodhi claimed that Swaraj was “indulging in an orgy of slander against Pakistan”.
She accused India of “crimes against humanity” and of carrying out a “campaign of brutality inside Kashmir”. To prove her point, she brandished a photo of a badly injured girl — ostensibly from Kashmir.
However, the photo in question was taken by award-winning photographer Heidi Levine inside the Gaza strip in 2014, and the girl had been injured in an Israeli air strike. The photo had been featured in many photo galleries posted online, including by the New York Timesand the Guardian. The picture used by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN was reported by a number of media outlets as that of Rawia Abu Joma’a, a 17-year-old girl injured in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza city in 2014.
