What can be learned from the famine myth in Gaza - opinion

For months, we have been hearing reports about starvation in Gaza and even the claim that Israel is using hunger as a war strategy. Israel has vehemently denied this accusation, pointing to the work of COGAT (Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), which facilitates the entry of hundreds of trucks of aid into Gaza daily. According to Israeli experts, the food delivered to  Gaza “exceeded international nutritional standards and should have provided sufficient nutrition for the entire Gaza population.”

Recent research by the Institute for National Security Studies has demonstrated that UN reports have knowingly created a distorted picture of the situation and led to unfounded accusations against Israel of intentionally causing starvation.

An inaccurate picture of the aid entering Gaza

Since the start of the war, the UN has been releasing reports and updates about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, showing a dire picture of a shortage of humanitarian aid, a severe nutritional crisis, and even the spread of famine in the area. A close examination of these reports, based on the UN’s own clarifications, shows that they portray an inaccurate and partial picture of the aid entering the Gaza Strip. The reports are based on incomplete data from sources in Gaza and disregard significant portions of aid shipments entering the Strip, as well as the complex situation on the ground. These reports have been used as a basis for allegations that Israel is preventing the entry of humanitarian aid in order to starve the population of the Gaza Strip, along with severe accusations of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide.

In short, the UN figures do not account for all the aid entering Gaza. UNRWA collects data only on aid entering the Strip via two land crossings (Kerem Shalom and Rafah) and only on trucks that they observed and registered while present at the two locations.

Their data does not include aid that was airdropped into the Gaza Strip or aid arriving by sea through the US floating pier (JLOTS). It also does not include aid received through the Erez crossing in the north, where UNRWA representatives are not stationed. Additionally, it ignores aid received at the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings that is collected by other aid organizations when UNRWA representatives are not present at the crossings. Thus, the data omits a significant amount of aid, including aid supplied by UN agencies, NGOs, and countries, as well as goods from the private sector, deliveries by the World Food Program (WFP), and flour deliveries to bakeries in northern Gaza. Supplies of gas and fuel are also not included in UNRWA figures. Furthermore, in May, the private sector supplied a larger volume of goods. These goods are included in the COGAT data but not in the UNRWA data, which only includes aid received by UN agencies and aid organizations that use its services.

The international community, it seems, uncritically accepts data presented by UNRWA, even though the organization’s neutrality in the Gaza war has been severely compromised. Some UNRWA staff were among the terrorists who committed the brutal 7 October attack on Israel. The Wall Street Journal reported that out of 12,000 UNRWA employees,  1,200 (10% including 23% of all male employees) are ‘operatives’ of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and about half of the employees have close relatives who belong to these terror groups.

UN Watch found widespread support for the October 7 atrocities among UNRWA teachers in Gaza. Screenshots of 249,000 Telegram messages show murderers and rapists being praised as “heroes,” the glorifying of the “education” the terrorists received in UNRWA, the gleeful sharing of photos of dead or captured Israelis, and the exhortation of their execution.

We’ve known for years that the UNRWA schools use a curriculum that cultivates hatred of and violence toward Jews. 

The famine myth is only one of many false claims that have emerged during this war. Media outlets have been quick to report unverified incidents, such as the alleged Israeli bombing of a hospital, in which it was claimed that 500 people died. This was a complete fabrication. An Islamic Jihad rocket had misfired and hit the adjacent parking lot, resulting in a much smaller number of casualties.

Gaza Health Ministry's media weapon

Statistics on casualties issued by the Gaza Health Ministry, parroted uncritically by media, have been weaponized to accuse Israel of genocide. These statistics were shown to be fake by experts on statistics and data science. Then, when the UN quietly announced that the casualty count was 11,000 less than previously thought, news outlets ignored it.

John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute in West Point, New York, said that in contrast to claims from Western leaders, including President Biden, the “steps that Israel has taken to prevent casualties are historic in comparison to all these other wars.” He outlined how the Israeli military took measures that no other military, including the American, had taken during a war, such as calling and texting individuals to warn them of a forthcoming air strike and sharing maps with plans for military maneuvers in certain areas.

The estimated civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio, at slightly over 1:1, is nine times lower than the UN-published global average, four to five times lower than numbers produced by the US and its allies (such as in Iraq and Afghanistan), and lower than any urban warfare scenario ever recorded in history. Yet Israel absurdly faces accusations of genocide.

WHY IS the world so quick to smear Israel with lies and impugn her with the worst of intentions?

Unpacking that question is like untangling many threads from a complex web. The accusations are nothing new. The genocide accusation, for example, echoes the Soviet propaganda that emerged in the 1960s. Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary antisemitism on the Left, states, “Today’s progressives are speaking the language of Soviet propaganda. The most extraordinary feature of the anti-Israel rhetoric flooding the West today is the extent to which it reproduces the motifs, tropes, slogans, and explanatory logic of late Soviet communist ideology.”

Another thread is the Radical Islamist ideology – emanating from Iran to its proxies in Gaza, Yemen, and Lebanon – which has a clearly stated agenda to destroy the Jewish state on the way to destroying America, the stronghold of Western values. Soviet antisemitism (cloaked as anti-Zionism) has coalesced with the powerful Islamic and Arab power bloc to weaponize international fora, like the UN, for its agenda.

Meanwhile, Western academia has been caught up in a decolonization frenzy that views anything emanating from the West as inherently evil, and therefore, the religious motivation of Islamic imperialism is naively “westplained” as “justified resistance.” The propensity to view anything Israel says as suspect and to assign nefarious motives draws on deeply embedded antisemitic tropes like the blood libel – the notion that Jews would intentionally harm innocents, particularly children – and conspiracy theories about power.

The threads of anti-Israel hatred are many and varied, but ultimately, they point to an ancient irrational hatred that is easily whipped up in every generation, drawing on the narratives and ideologies of the day to scapegoat the Jew or, in this case, the Jew among nations. Just as the Jew has been called the canary in the coal mine, the early warning system of the ill-health of the nation, so Israel functions in much the same way.

Israel’s battle is for civilization against barbarism, for the value of life versus the glorification of death. For these radical anti-Israel forces, freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea” is simply the stepping stone to fulfilling their greater imperial ambitions. If the Western world cannot recognize the battle it is engaged in, the fight is already lost. It’s time to wake up and take back what is rapidly being stripped away.

The writer, a historian, is the founder of the Indigenous Coalition For Israel and co-director of the Indigenous Embassy, Jerusalem. www.indigenouscoalition.org