Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 

Maybe you can spot the fallacy in the following:

If you can, you should congratulate yourself on possessing the capacity for critical rationality even when evaluating claims that cast Israel in a bad light. That faculty renders you more perceptive than much of the Western journalistic establishment.

 

Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.

 

“Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.

 

The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.

 

When it eventually gets around to exploring the allegation it broadcast on social media, NBC News couched the claim: “Around 14,000 babies face severe malnutrition if a lot more aid trucks don’t reach the Palestinian enclave soon, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday,” the report read.

 

That was a “clarification” from the original claim that NBC News and many other journalistic enterprises promoted. Their mistake was to trust the BBC’s reporting and their source, a U.N. functionary. “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” Fletcher told the British media venue — a claim that horrified and inflamed the civilized world. The BBC ran with it. Only later did the outlet ask him “how he had arrived at that figure.” Fletcher “said there were ‘strong teams on the ground’ operating in medical centers and schools — but did not provide further details.”

 

The BBC subsequently walked the original explosive allegation back to the point that it no longer remotely recognized the assertion that libeled both the Israeli government and the Israeli people:

 

The BBC later asked for clarification on the figure from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), which said: “We are pointing to the imperative of getting supplies in to save an estimated 14,000 babies suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Gaza, as the IPC partnership has warned about. We need to get the supplies in as soon as possible, ideally within the next 48 hours.”

 

It highlighted a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) which stated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026.

 

The IPC report says this could take place over the course of about a year – not 48 hours. [Emphasis added]

 

So, not “babies” but young children. Not “death” but possible malnutrition. Not 48 hours but twelve full months, and only if conditions persist along a straight-line trajectory. Other than that. . . .

 

If only this were the first time the Western press reported feverishly on the forthcoming famine inside the Gaza Strip that never occurred. In the summer of last year, the IPC led the press astray in precisely the same way. “Famine is imminent,” the group declared in a claim that was uncritically retailed by virtually every legacy media outlet. But the organization soon admitted that its initial assessment was faulty. “The available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring,” the IPC confessed. In fact, the Netanyahu government had increased aid deliveries into Gaza, and the humanitarian situation was not conducive to the onset of mass starvation.

 

None of this is to say that the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza is endurable. Netanyahu himself has stressed the need to prevent excess hunger in the Strip — a conundrum insofar as allowing aid to flow into the Strip without allowing it to fall into Hamas’s hands, which relies on it to preserve its control over Gaza’s civilian population, is a delicate balance.

 

Still, the Israeli government is justified in its objection to the IPC’s findings, which Jerusalem maintains are “based on assumptions that have proven inaccurate and alarmist time and time again.” They failed to account for the distribution of aid from over 25,000 trucks following a brief cease-fire deal earlier this year, and they rely on U.N. sources for information, “which during the ceasefire period reflected only about a third of the actual humanitarian aid that entered Gaza.”

 

Journalists were stung by the U.N. and its pathological mistrust of Israel last year, and they were burned again in exactly the same way this year. We might expect the Fourth Estate to stop touching that same hot stove. But there are no reputational consequences for assuming the worst of Israel, so why should we expect a sudden outbreak of prudence?