By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
When it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, UN
representatives should no longer be quoted on live news broadcasts—if at all.
This will do more to reduce the spread of misinformation than anything Mark
Zuckerberg has been asked to do over the past decade.
Yesterday, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, said
this to a BBC anchor on-air: “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the
next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”
Just to put this in perspective, that number would equal
more than half of the total number of civilian casualties during the entire
course of the war so far. The BBC’s Anna Foster replied that 14,000 is “an
extraordinary figure.” To which Fletcher replied that he would characterize it
as a “chilling figure.” To anyone listening to the interview undistractedly, it
would be immediately recognizable as “a made-up figure.” Foster’s even engaging
with it was extraordinary. It was Fletcher’s willingness to spread a lie of
that magnitude that was chilling.
How did Fletcher come to the 14,000 figure? “We have
strong teams on the ground.”
With that, the number was off and running. According to
the Times
of Israel, British lawmakers in the House of Commons cited the number
during parliamentary debate.
It turned out that the number of dead babies in the UN
projection was actually zero. Zero babies. Fletcher had garbled a report that
worried that 14,000 children could possibly suffer malnutrition over the course
of an entire year if no food aid were allowed into Gaza for that entire period
of time.
Again, number of deaths in the study: zero. Timeline for
the study: one year.
Obviously Tom Fletcher cannot ever be allowed near a news
audience again. I would say that Fletcher should probably find another line of
work, but whoever would succeed him atop the UN humanitarian pyramid would
likely be just as unreliable and unethical.
And that’s the problem. It’s true that no one outside of
Goebbels’ communications team has so propagandized a global audience during a
war to exterminate the Jewish people. But the UN inflates figures all the time,
and it collaborates with genocidal fascist death squads to do so. Fletcher is
what happens when you irresponsibly allow the UN to be considered a voice of
authority.
No UN personality should be quoted without the news
agency first checking into the statement. About anything.
And anyway, what are Fletcher’s trusted teams on the
ground up to these days? Well, yesterday, Israel facilitated the entry of 93 UN
trucks of food, supplies, and medicine into Gaza. How many, according to the UN
itself, reached their destination?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s a number that has come up a
couple of times already. That’s right—zero.
According to Haaretz,
“the UN said that none of the trucks that entered Gaza reached their
destination due to traffic, logistics and security problems.”
Traffic. Traffic. The United Nations says it
failed to deliver baby food to Gazan infants because of traffic.
The UN—at least in terms of anything involving the
Mideast—cannot be trusted to act and cannot be trusted to speak. It will not
say what is true, and it will not even come close to accomplishing the tasks it
demands for itself. So here again we have our favorite number: zero. There are
zero things the UN can be trusted with in this conflict. Stop quoting them,
stop delegating important tasks to them, and certainly stop repeating anything
you hear from them without some sort of fact-checking effort first.
Listening to the UN will get people killed. How many? I
cannot speculate, but the number is certainly greater than zero.
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