How to Hide a Famine

“The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” These were the words of food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism earlier this week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bald-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza.” To the extent that there is hunger, he says, it is the fault of Hamas for stealing United Nations aid—a claim backed by no evidence, part and parcel of the demonization used to justify all its actions in Gaza.

But Netanyahu knows perfectly well how he could prove who is telling the truth and yet chooses not to do so. Three steps would settle any possible denial or deliberate mystification about what is happening there—and who is really responsible for the bald-faced lie.

First, international journalists should be allowed into the Gaza Strip.

Since Israel began military actions and siege in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, it has not permitted international journalists into Gaza. Israel says it is for their safety. But war correspondents know the risks: they have faced them in war zones around the world.

Of course, excellent reporting has been done by Palestinian journalists, including local staff of international news networks and those working for local media outlets, under the most horrific of conditions. Some Israeli news outlets, notably Haaretz, have also sounded the alarm. But more than 170 media workers have been killed. In the last week, the news agency AFP has begun evacuating its Palestinian journalists because they are suffering hunger, saying “We do not want to watch them die [of starvation].”

But the biases against Palestinians are so strong in the United States, the distrust so entrenched, that their own, familiar correspondents have the greatest chance of cutting through the fog of war and Israeli propaganda.

Second, let aid workers in to do a proper survey of hunger.

The IPC system relies on three kinds of data: what families are eating, how many children are malnourished, and whether there is an increase in the death rate driven by hunger and disease. When the indicators for all three of these indices reach certain levels, famine is declared.

But amid the social breakdown that accompanies state violence and humanitarian disaster, getting data becomes much more difficult. And if a government wants to suppress reports of famine, it can easily do so—by impeding data collection. Israel has done exactly this: suppress humanitarian data, helped by its friends in the Biden and now Trump administration.

When the first reports indicating probable famine were published last year, members of Congress pressed President Biden to insist that Israel permit unhindered humanitarian aid or cease weapons transfers. State Department officials concluded in a forty-six-page report that Israel had obstructed the flow of food in Gaza. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the findings, a senior adviser in the refugees bureau, Stacy Gilbert, resigned. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement. “To deny this is absurd and shameful. That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

While the administration’s verdict was still pending, Israel allowed enough assistance to flow to keep Gaza below the threshold needed to determine famine. But as soon as Blinken finalized his statement to Congress exonerating Israel, thereby allowing U.S. weapons transfers to continue, Israel imposed additional restrictions on humanitarian aid. And since then, Israel has only made it more and more difficult for humanitarian workers to do the surveys their work depends on. Last December, when the United States’ own Famine Early Warning System reported that famine conditions existed, then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel insisted the report be retracted.

As a result of Israel’s refusal to permit better data collection, this week’s IPC report didn’t contain new survey data. It relied on inferences from old data supported by a host of individual reports from the field.

Getting up-to-date, reliable, and comprehensive data isn’t just vital for knowing whether food insecurity reaches a standardized definition, or something almost as horrible. It’s also essential for a humanitarian program to be able to target those in need, in the places where they are, with what they need. A desperately malnourished child who needs intensive therapeutic care in hospital can’t be helped by boxes of pasta and lentils. A pocket of starving families in the rubble of their homes in northern Gaza can’t be reached if aid workers don’t know they are there.

Instead, Israel is mounting a campaign to blanket social media with denial and obfuscation about the severity of the crisis. A high-profile case this week revolves around the severe malnutrition of an eighteen-month-old boy, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, whose emaciated body was photographed for a story under the headline “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” by the New York Times. The paper issued a “correction” yesterday, adding that he suffers from “pre-existing health problems.” Israeli propagandists argue that this discredits claims of starvation. But of course, Israelis know that there are people in Gaza with pre-existing medical conditions that make them especially vulnerable to shortage of food and medicine, and all children born during the last two years in Gaza face greater risk for ill health due to the destruction to hospitals and the health care system.

These facts do not exonerate Israel from the charge of weaponizing starvation—on the contrary, it’s an aggravating factor in the accusation. Israel is concealing the truth by refusing to allow a proper and independent survey of conditions.

Third, make aid monitoring transparent.

As he always has, Netanyahu now blames Hamas for looting aid as part of his denial campaign. But Israel hasn’t provided any information in support of that claim. Last week, Reuters reported that the United States’ own investigations into 156 incidents of aid theft found no evidence for Hamas stealing aid at scale, and Israeli officers even admitted that this was correct to the New York Times.

Nor do more isolated allegations of Hamas theft stand up to scrutiny. A few weeks ago, a video of armed men on aid trucks was circulated by Israeli leaders, who cited it as evidence that Hamas was hijacking UN aid before shutting down the aid corridor. Those were lies. The shipment was organized by a local community group, which put their own guards on the vehicles. Tracking by Forensic Architecture confirmed that the trucks safely reached a World Food Programme warehouse, where the aid was indeed distributed.

The United Nations has mechanisms for monitoring aid from start to finish—including auditing the communities where it is distributed. It proposed a detailed plan for this in May; Israel has not given approval.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.-registered, Israeli-backed entity that was established earlier this year and employs military contractors, claims it has four “secure distribution sites.” But the only thing secure is the transport of aid to those sites, and more than 750 people who have come to collect aid have been shot, many others trampled in desperate crowds. (Nearly 300 have reportedly been killed around UN and other aid convoys.) When the gates are opened—for just a few minutes every day—it’s chaos. The strong push their way to the front, seize as many boxes as they can, discard what’s of lesser value, and the stragglers pick through the leftovers. There are reports that people are robbed by armed men on the way home. Other food is sold in the market. “What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland,” Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. soldier who worked as a subcontractor with the GHF, said this week on Democracy Now!.

Besides, right-wing Israeli politicians have objected to any food at all going to Gaza. Last year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that starving all Palestinians in Gaza would be “just and moral,” complaining that “no one in the world would let us do it.” At various times, Israeli vigilantes have blocked aid trucks traveling into Gaza, sometimes opening sacks of food and pouring the contents onto the ground.

The GHF website says it handed out over 1.2 million meals on July 29. But it cannot tell us who ate those meals. Was it the weak and vulnerable 20 percent who are starving? Was it healthy young men? Was it criminal gangs? Was it fighters or other members of Hamas? At best, the GHF is utterly incompetent. At worst, it’s a cynical ruse—showing that Israel isn’t actually concerned about theft of aid supplies at all. Either way, the whole arrangement is criminal when it abets mass starvation.

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The truth is clear: as all possible mechanisms to stop Israel’s illegal onslaught are pursued, a full spectrum of aid is also needed in Gaza today.

The best guarantee on the professionalism, honesty, and effectiveness of its delivery is to let international journalists report on what is happening. If we have a transparent, rigorous humanitarian data collection exercise, we will know how best to meet the most immediate needs and save lives.

And we will also reveal beyond any shadow of doubt who the bald-faced liars are.

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