By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
First, there was the “imminent” famine in Gaza of which
the United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) warned
back in March of last year — a claim that was breathlessly retailed by dozens
of media outlets before the IPC belatedly recanted. “The available evidence
does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring,” the outfit confessed weeks later, an admission that was
received by its once fevered audience with indifference.
Then there was the famine this past May, in which
“food-starved” Gazans “resorted to grinding lentils, pasta and rice for baking
bread amid severe shortages of flour,” as the Agence-France Presse put it. The allegation that a
long-forecast starvation campaign had begun in earnest following the collapse
of a short-lived cease-fire between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces was
buttressed by the IPC’s claim that roughly 14,000 “babies” would die of
nutritional deficiencies within the next 48 hours in the absence of
international intervention. Then came the “clarification”: not “babies” but
children, not “death” but possible malnutrition, and not “48 hours” but twelve
months, and only if the conditions that prevailed in May persisted in
perpetuity. Once again, the correction received a fraction of the attention the
original salacious accusation earned.
The U.N.’s ire may not have been genuine, but those who
mourn for the state in which the Gazan people find themselves are surely
sincere. Today, there is real hardship in Gaza, and food shortages on the Strip
have proven more verifiable than they were previously. The United Nations and
its allies want you to believe that this unacceptable reality is the fruition
of an Israeli strategy — one that has long been alleged but which has now
finally arrived in earnest. The reality is more complicated.
Earlier this year, Benjamin
Netanyahu paused the inflow of goods and supplies into Gaza via U.N.
intermediaries “because Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of
Gaza from getting them,” using those “supplies to finance its terror machine.”
To prevent the onset of a humanitarian catastrophe, Jerusalem, in coordination
with the U.S. government and private philanthropic interests, reintroduced aid
via the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). In the space of two months and with
just four distribution sites, the GHF claims to have delivered over 100 million
meals to the Strip’s 2 million people.
GHF put an end to the U.N.’s “self-distribution” system,
which is an antiseptic way of describing a chaotic ransacking of aid trucks as
locals take what they can. The GHF’s approach deprived Hamas of a source of
revenue and the means to extort the population, but it created bottlenecks.
Those chokepoints were exacerbated further by Hamas attacks near GHF’s
distribution sites as it sought to scare locals away from a project that risked
undermining its influence.
Almost from the outset, the U.N. and its allies lent credence to the cartoonishly
evil notion that the U.S. and Israel’s humanitarian enterprise was a mirage — a
way to lure unsuspecting Gazans into a kill box where they were to be
slaughtered. And when Palestinians weren’t being wantonly shot, they were being
deliberately famished. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than
just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is
engineered scarcity.”
For weeks, we were privy to this claim and the implicit
conclusion that only the United Nations could properly distribute food aid. It
was a claim that utterly disregarded verifiable evidence — indeed, the evidence
of your own eyes — that Hamas has routinely raided
U.N. convoys, pilfered their goods, and hid them away from the population
(culminating, on at least one occasion, in a riotous effort to liberate aid from a Hamas-run U.N. facility). But the IDF has now
confessed that the GHF’s efforts, substantial though they may be, are
insufficient to prevent the prospect of widespread malnutrition (the IDF
maintains that there is no famine in Gaza, but it has admitted that the
prospect is real).
So, Jerusalem relaxed its restrictions on aid
distribution through U.N.-linked channels. But the aid did not move. As Israel
claimed and proved, once again, via ample video evidence, thousands of tons of aid and 950
trucks sat idle on the Israeli side of the Gaza border even as the Netanyahu
government urged the U.N. to act. But it would not. Why?
According to the Israelis, the impasse stemmed from two
disputes. First, the U.N. maintained that the IDF would have to lower its
standards for what products it would allow onto the Strip. “But other reasons
concerned the U.N.’s unwillingness to move through certain areas that the IDF
said were secure, but that the U.N. did not take its word for it, refusing to
advance,” the Jerusalem Post reported. That suggests that the U.N.
sought to leverage food aid to secure for itself a veto over Israel’s security
priorities in the Strip.
The Post continued:
A top IDF official met with leading
UN bureaucrats regarding the issue on Tuesday, demanding to know how they could
accuse Israel of causing famine in Gaza, which, again, has not happened yet but
might shortly should the UN continue to abandon its trucks — while
simultaneously leaving the aid trucks to sit there without distributing the
food.
According to the senior IDF
official, the UN bureaucrats sat quietly for at least 20 seconds, struggling to
come up with a response. Eventually, one of them said that they would make more
of an effort to get the trucks moving again, the IDF reported.
Democrats should recognize the difficulty associated with
getting aid into the right hands in the Strip. Joe Biden encountered it when he
erected his ill-considered pier in the Mediterranean, which broke
apart after a few months, during which American contractors were shelled and
shot at by Hamas terrorists. No one seems willing to ask themselves why Hamas
is so protective of the U.N.-administered aid apparatus, nor why the U.N. is
just as protective of its partners in Gaza.
Quite unlike previous disputed claims of widespread
nutritional deficiencies in the Strip, few today argue that conditions in Gaza
are not dire. There is still plenty of “Pallywood” to sift through. The viral images of an allegedly starving child, who in reality
suffered from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, are indicative of that ongoing
campaign of misdirection. In addition, the allegation that Hamas has long tried
to popularize — the tendentious accusation that Israel is deliberately
engineering a famine — has gone mainstream. In certain quarters, the extraordinary claim that verges on blood libel is accepted at face value. Even in outlets that are typically friendly
toward the Netanyahu government, some now acknowledge that Netanyahu’s throttling of the U.N.’s
access to the Strip — however tactically and strategically justified — has
backfired.
But it must also be said that Jerusalem is playing to an
audience that applies a double standard to Israel. Hamas has lost the war it
started on October 7, 2023. Its continued resistance serves only to immiserate
the Gazan people. The war would end tomorrow if Hamas surrendered today. But
neither the U.N. nor its supporters place any onus on Hamas — the supposed
governing authority in Gaza — for its people’s welfare.
To hear Israel’s critics tell it, the righteous defensive
war imposed on it by Hamas has reached its sell-by date, if only because Hamas
has proven that it is willing to sacrifice every last Palestinian to its cause.
The terrorist entity has grown bolder as the West tires of Israel’s commitment
to its own sovereignty and the longevity of its citizens, even flirting with
recognizing a Palestinian state — not as a reward for good governance in the
territories but to punish Jerusalem.
Hamas has every reason to believe that pusillanimous
elements in the West will save it from total defeat. They might be right. And
if the lesson of this war is that genocidal terrorism pays out in the end, we will
see more genocidal terrorism.
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