No One Who Bought the Gaza Starvation Narrative Deserves to Be Taken Seriously

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold published a bombshell report this week:

 

At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC, a U.N.–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.

 

Today, U.N. functionaries are encountering a very different problem in Gaza: “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5.” And that is to say nothing of the clearly well-fed adult Gazans who miraculously resurface only after the latest round of fighting with Israel has concluded.

 

“A researcher who has overseen teams collecting malnutrition data in the Horn of Africa remarked that she had ‘never seen’ the emergence of obesity and excess weight in a place that was declared only a year earlier to be suffering from famine,” Reingold continued. “How did Gaza go from being officially classified as famine-stricken to having—in less than a year—one of the region’s lowest levels of severe child malnutrition? Humanitarian agencies have failed so far to answer that fundamental question, and one major organization is still fundraising on the claim that starvation rages on in Gaza.”

 

We’re confronted with one of two possibilities: Either Israel has pulled off the greatest disappearing act in human history or the famine we were supposed to obsess ourselves with in the spring of 2025 never happened.

 

It is impossible to summon any sympathy for those who were surprised by UNICEF’s findings. They are either hopelessly gullible or were so committed to their alternative version of reality that they refused to acknowledge any other. After all, the falseness of the allegation against Israel was obvious at the time.

 

Discerning news consumers might have noticed the discrepancy in the international press’s coverage of “food-starved Gaza,” in which residents were forced to eat “lentils, pasta, and rice.” They might have asked themselves why self-described humanitarian organizations resorted to proving the existence of a famine by promoting pictures of children — and it was only ever children — who suffered from emaciating genetic disorders or preexisting conditions. They could have just applied elementary logic to claims like the one issued by the BBC alleging that there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours” unless U.N. functionaries could reach them. That one depended as much on the audience’s innumeracy as their indifference to the truth.

 

Much of the public’s confusion is attributable to the United Nations itself. The United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) insisted a famine was afoot in the first place. The organization was incensed when Israel limited its access to the Gaza Strip after it was revealed that Hamas was raiding U.N. convoys and rationing food aid to the Gazan people — that is, when it wasn’t working directly with the U.N. Israel and the US established an alternative aid-distribution mechanism in the form of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but that charity was swiftly accused of deliberately starving the Gazan people. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is engineered scarcity.”

 

If the U.N. wasn’t overseeing its distribution, there might as well have been no food aid at all. That’s what Democratic politicians in the U.S. appeared to believe. Or, at least, those were the shibboleths the activist class expected them to mouth. Far too many Democratic politicians dutifully obliged.

 

“Hunger and malnutrition are widespread, and, alarmingly, deaths due to starvation, especially among children, are increasing,” read an open letter signed by 40 Democratic lawmakers. Senator Peter Welch (Vt.) accused Israel of executing a “war crime,” using “starvation” to advance the “government’s strategy of forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land.” Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii) correctly intuited that it was “not at all credible” to think that the Israeli military was incapable of providing aid to the Gazan people, but he rejected the logic of his own conclusion.

 

Israel’s “blocking all food and emergency aid” ensured that “tens of thousands of children” would face “imminent starvation,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) concluded. “Half a million Palestinians are now at serious risk of famine,” said the equally emotive appeal of Senator Chris Murphy (Ct.), “and every day that food and medicine are kept from starving families, more children suffer, and more innocent lives are lost.” To Senator Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the “burgeoning famine” in Gaza amounted to “collective punishment that is clearly illegal under international law.”

 

“This man-made famine and genocide must end,” wrote Representative Summer Lee (Pa.). “Over 2 million people are being intentionally deprived of food, water, medicine, and baby formula,” Representative Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) concurred. None of them could beat Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib’s dramatic crescendo: “This is the final stage of their genocide,” she declared.

 

Some of these heedless politicians and their credulous followers might convince themselves that the epochal famine they warned of last year has since been mitigated. After all, high-intensity ground operations inside Gaza concluded ten months ago. But that is not an evasion that is available to those who continue to accuse Israel of engineering a “genocide” inside Gaza even today. Nor would an appeal to that kind of illogic absolve those who subordinated their powers of critical thinking to their desire to participate in a moral panic.

 

The most you could say for those who fell in line is that they deferred to the U.N.’s authority. After all, it was that body that sounded the alarms in the first place. But when Reingold went looking for the data that informed the U.N.’s conclusions, she found that the folders to which she’d been granted access “containing recent presentations and meeting minutes” were “gone.” They’d been offline for about a week before Reingold discovered it, only for them to be “restored about 11 hours later.” Suddenly, the IPC’s website showed that malnutrition rates in Gaza had precipitously declined.

 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” one Israeli government consultant told Reingold. That isn’t just true of the United Nations. The global anti-Israel movement rests on a reliable and durable foundation of incuriosity. But that is an explanation, not an excuse. At the very least, we should expect those who allowed themselves to be taken in by this flimsy lie to explain why we should ever take them seriously again.