Just before dawn on Friday in Greenwich Village, scarlet paint splashed across stone steps and lamps outside the apartment building where Joseph Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, lives. On the pavement, a taunt: “Joe Kahn lies Gaza dies.” Police said no arrests had been made as of Friday and the inquiry was ongoing. The building was defaced in the early hours, reports place the mess discovered around 3:00 a.m., with the NYPD receiving calls shortly afterwards, and officers are investigating the attack as vandalism. 

A Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, condemned the targeting of a private residence. “People are free to disagree with The New York Times’s reporting but vandalism and targeting of individuals and their families crosses a line,” he said, adding the paper would work with authorities. 

This latest episode echoes an earlier one blocks away in Midtown, where the Times’s headquarters was splattered with red paint and daubed in white spray with the same accusation: “NYT lies, Gaza dies”,  after the paper appended an editor’s note to a front-page story about starvation in Gaza. No group claimed responsibility for the Times Square vandalism, which remains under investigation. 

Why this boiled over

The rage is rooted in a running, highly politicised dispute over the media’s portrayal of the famine in Gaza. On 24 July, the Times published “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” featuring a wrenching photograph of 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq. Days later, the paper added an editor’s note saying new information from the hospital and medical records showed the child had pre-existing health conditions, and that detail had been added to provide fuller context. The update did not retract the article’s core reporting on widespread malnutrition, but it catalysed an online and street-level backlash that quickly jumped from digital feeds to the Times’s glass façade, and now, to Kahn’s front steps. 

Criticism of the Times came from several directions at once. Media columns and wire services noted the clarification; pro-Israel advocates amplified it to argue that famine claims were overstated; pro-Palestinian activists argued the original image remained emblematic of a broader humanitarian calamity. Semafor captured the dynamic succinctly: the paper’s coverage was being “lived under a microscope” as the Gaza narrative shifted and every caption, correction and edit drew forensic scrutiny. 

What the facts now show about famine in Gaza

Whatever one thinks of that single photograph, independent, authoritative assessments have since hardened. On 22 August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global standard for such determinations.  confirmed that Famine (IPC Phase 5) is occurring in Gaza Governorate and projected to expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis without immediate, unfettered aid. United Nations agencies (FAO, UNICEF, WFP and WHO) issued a joint statement the same day: more than half a million people are “trapped in famine,” with deaths from hunger and disease rising. 

Political leaders have split over how to describe that reality. In July, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, insisted, “There is no starvation in Gaza”, a claim fact-checkers deemed flatly contradicted by UN and medical data. Days later, US President Donald Trump publicly broke with Netanyahu’s line, saying there is “real starvation” in Gaza and, referring to televised images, “you can’t fake that.” The UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, called starvation in Gaza a “moral outrage,” blaming Israel’s failure to allow sufficient aid. 

The death toll has continued to climb amid these arguments. Local health authorities report more than 63,000 people killed since 2023, figures that major newswires regularly cite while noting they cannot independently verify every casualty. 

Targeting homes, testing boundaries

Friday’s vandalism follows a troubling pattern in New York City: institutions and individuals linked, or perceived to be linked, to one side of the war being targeted at home. In June 2024, for example, the homes of Brooklyn Museum leaders were defaced in red paint, prompting city leaders to denounce the acts as antisemitic intimidation. Protest actions have also repeatedly spilled into lobbies and public spaces, including sit-ins at the Times building, as the war and the hostage crisis grind on. 

A delicate line for journalism

For the Times, the stakes are twin-tracked. On the one hand, the newsroom faces an unusually concentrated campaign of external pressure, some of it peaceful, some of it destructive, over coverage decisions that are, in ordinary times, resolved through updates, corrections and robust letters pages. On the other, the humanitarian facts on the ground are shifting rapidly and grimly.

The paper’s statement that it will work with the police underscores a simple point: protesting a newspaper’s work is fair game; harassing staff at home is not. But on the small Greenwich Village pavement where someone scrawled a verdict in red, a different question lingers: when righteous fury crosses the threshold of a private doorway, what does it advance?