Pak diplomat tries to pass off Gaza girl’s pic as that of Kashmiri
NEWDELHI: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”.
Lodhi 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.
The official Twitter account of the Pakistani mission to the UN also tweeted the photo, and at the time of writing this article, it was the pinned tweet.
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.
he photo had been featured in many online galleries, including by the New York Times and 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.
Swaraj had said India has risen despite being the principal destination of Pakistan’s nefarious export of terrorism. She also called Pakistan an exporter of terrorism.