The Famine That Wasn't: How the UN, Media and Hamas Waged a War of Disinformation
Behind this narrative lies a calculated strategy: the weaponization of humanitarian suffering, orchestrated by Hamas — the entity that controls Gaza and its distribution of aid — and amplified by willing accomplices in the United Nations system and global media. The goal is not to report the truth but to smear Israel, rally international condemnation, and shield Hamas from accountability.
In May 2024, Israeli government data directly contradicted the IPC's claims. In June and July 2024, media reports continued to cite a "high risk of famine," but none could point to actual data proving that famine had occurred. The famine never arrived, but the headlines kept coming.
[I]n late June 2024, the IPC issued a report titled, "Famine Review Committee: Gaza Strip, June 2024 – IPC's third review report." It showed that the previous famine predictions were not plausible, contradicted all available data, and were based on incorrect assumptions.... [T]he findings of the "Famine Review Committee" were barely covered by the media outside of Israel.
Regardless of the consistent failure of the dire warnings of famine to come to fruition, the repetition of statements and headlines throughout 2024 set the narrative in the minds of the world: Famine in Gaza. Tellingly, the warnings were always couched in language that allowed for plausible deniability. There was always a "risk" of an "imminent" or "looming" famine -- a famine that just never arrived.
According to the World Food Programme, sustaining Gaza's estimated population of 2.1 million people requires approximately 62,000 metric tons of food per month.
From March through December 2024, 788,216 tons of food aid entered Gaza — an average of 78,821 tons per month, more than 25% above the WFP's stated threshold.
Famously, on May 20, 2025, Tom Fletcher, head of the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told BBC Radio that "there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them." While this claim was walked back by the UN, the narrative damage was done.
The food was entering Gaza — far above the minimum necessary — so why was there any hunger at all? The answer is straightforward: Hamas has weaponized food. The terrorist group that controls Gaza has systematically blocked, diverted, looted, hoarded, and resold humanitarian aid at exorbitant prices.
Operating four sites in the southern and central Gaza Strip, the GHF is an American project operating in close coordination with Israeli authorities. The purpose of the GHF is to deliver food aid directly to individual Gazan families while bypassing Hamas-controlled distribution networks. The GHF operates with a high level of logistical transparency, tracking aid deliveries with barcodes and GPS to ensure that food reaches its intended recipients.
"[S]o who's doing the killing? That's a good question. You honestly think it's some U.S. contractors, or it's the IDF just gunning people down. Or is it Hamas... because it's business to them. If they can keep people from getting the free food, then they can sell the food that was supposed to be given to them for free. That's what no one seems to be wanting to talk about. Why not?" — US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, August 8, 2025.
The daily claims of deaths at from IDF fire distribution sites always come from staff at Hamas-controlled hospitals or unverified eyewitness testimonies. There has yet to be even a single video clip of such an incident occurring, even as virtually every move anyone makes in Gaza is recorded on a smartphone and shared widely.
Macron's pledge to recognize a Palestinian state – quickly joined by the UK, Canada and Australia – and the most recent surge in aid into Hamas-controlled areas through airdrops and increases in trucks entering Gaza, together with the aggressive demonization of Israel in the media and diplomatic arena, have led Hamas to believe that time is on their side.
Hamas knows that it has no chance of beating the Israel militarily, but its propaganda war has been a smashing success. If all it takes is keeping Gaza's civilians hungry and desperate, that is a price Hamas is more than happy to pay.
Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the international media, humanitarian organizations, and UN-affiliated agencies have relentlessly pushed one of the most damaging blood libels in history: that Israel is deliberately starving the people of the Gaza Strip. In headline after headline, and through "official" UN reports and viral images, the world has been told that Gaza teeters on the edge of famine — or that famine has already taken hold. However, these warnings, loudly declared, have repeatedly failed to materialize.
Behind this narrative lies a calculated strategy: the weaponization of humanitarian suffering, orchestrated by Hamas — the entity that controls Gaza and its distribution of aid — and amplified by willing accomplices in the United Nations system and global media. The goal is not to report the truth but to smear Israel, rally international condemnation, and shield Hamas from accountability.
A Timeline of False Famine Warnings
Beginning in late 2023, various UN agencies, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) began issuing increasingly dire alerts about Gaza's food situation. In December 2023, the IPC issued a projection that Gaza faced a "Risk of Famine" if the conflict and access conditions did not improve.
According to that report, already at that point, "over 15 percent (378,000 people) of Gazans were in catastrophic IPC Phase 5," the food insecurity phase that qualifies as "famine" .
Phase 5 is the most severe phase of the IPC's classification system. One of the defining criteria for Phase 5 famine conditions is "one out of three children being acutely malnourished and two people dying per day for every 10,000 inhabitants," due to starvation. In other words, at this point there should have been 75 daily famine deaths in Gaza.
At the end of February 2024, the UN issued a press release declaring "Famine Imminent in Gaza, Humanitarian Officials Tell Security Council." This statement also declared an increase in the number of affected Gazans: "At least 576,000 people in Gaza – one-quarter of the population – are 'one step away from famine.'"
Then in March 2024, the IPC and FEWS NET again declared that famine was "imminent" in northern Gaza, upping the number of Gazans at risk yet again. CNN reported, "Famine in northern Gaza is imminent as more than 1 million people face 'catastrophic' levels of hunger, new report warns." Crucially, the March IPC report put the number of Gazans experiencing Phase 5 famine conditions as of February 15 at 677,000. Based on the criteria for this classification, this would have put daily starvation deaths at 135.
However, when follow-up data arrived, these warnings unraveled. According to Hamas' "Ministry of Health" figures, which are cited by the World Health Organization (WHO), in the nine months between October 7, 2023 and June 6, 2024 there were a total of 32 deaths from malnutrition in Gaza. A study by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), published in February 2025, revealed that even those deaths were largely attributed to intestinal infections, not hunger.
In fact, despite media headlines to the contrary, the total number of starvation and malnutrition deaths reported by the Hamas "Ministry of Health" between October 2023 and the end of June 2025 was still under 100 — less than a single day's predicted total, had the IPC Phase 5 classification been accurate. If the IPC predictions had held, there would have been tens of thousands of starvation deaths in 2024 alone.
In April 2024, the UN and the World Food Programme (WFP) issued dire warnings. "We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation," said Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director in Geneva. "There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks."
This pattern continued. In May 2024, Israeli government data directly contradictedthe IPC's claims. In June and July 2024, media reports continued to cite a "high risk of famine," but none could point to actual data proving that famine had occurred. The famine never arrived, but the headlines kept coming.
After months of warnings of "imminent" and "looming" catastrophic famine, including official-sounding numbers attached to every prediction, in late June 2024, the IPC issued a report titled, "Famine Review Committee: Gaza Strip, June 2024 – IPC's third review report." It showed that the previous famine predictions were not plausible, contradicted all available data, and were based on incorrect assumptions. After months of worldwide media echoing the dire warnings of famine in Gaza, the findings of the "Famine Review Committee" were barely covered by the media outside of Israel.
In spite of this report, and simultaneous to it, were more shrill warnings. CNN reported at the time:
"Nearly half a million are projected to face catastrophic levels of hunger, the most severe level on the IPC scale ... according to the report96% of the population of Gaza – more than 2 million people – will face crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels of food insecurity through at least the end of September."
CNN conveniently left out the fact that the same report admitted that all the previous famine predictions came up empty.
Not to be deterred by the facts, the UN and its related agencies' warnings of impending famine continued hot and heavy. "Food supplies to Gaza dwindling as famine looms, warns UN," was the headline in the Financial Times on August 16, 2024.
In September, Víctor Aguayo, UNICEF Director of Child Nutrition, told journalistsat the UN in New York that "The nutrition situation in Gaza is one of the most severe that we have ever seen". His statement was published by the UN with the accompanying headline, "Risk of Famine is Real."
Then on October 17, 2024, the WFP/IPC published another report which declared that "Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza risk famine this winter."
The next month, the Guardian reported that "a committee of global food security experts" called the Famine Review Committee, declared that there was a "strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas" of the northern Gaza Strip.
By December 2024, FEWS NET was forced to retract part of its similar predictions, due to flawed population estimates. Yet no equivalent retraction appeared in the media. Instead, the world was left with the impression of ongoing, deliberate Israeli starvation policies, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
After January and February 2025 saw unprecedented quantities of food entering Gaza, the WFP website declared that the "Surge in aid starts pulling people back from the brink of starvation." No starvation after all, once again.
Regardless of the consistent failure of the dire warnings of famine to come to fruition, the repetition of statements and headlines throughout 2024 set the narrative in the minds of the world: Famine in Gaza. Tellingly, the warnings were always couched in language that allowed for plausible deniability. There was always a "risk" of an "imminent" or "looming" famine -- a famine that just never arrived.
On July 29, 2025, the IPC quietly inserted a new asterisk into its "Gaza alert" that lowers the bar for a famine call — allowing a declaration of famine at 15% acute child malnutrition measured by mid-upper arm circumferences (MUAC) if there is "evidence of rapidly worsening underlying drivers," a vague measure that leaves open a range of possibilities to justify declaring famine conditions. That shift departs from the IPC's longstanding famine threshold of plus or minus 30% acute child malnutrition based on weight-for-height (WHZ) or oedema. The same alert leaned on non-public "internal" datasets to assert more than >20,000 child admissions for acute malnutrition and at least 16 hunger-related child deaths— numbers that outsiders cannot verify. To perpetuate the "famine in Gaza" narrative, they moved the goalposts and hid the evidence.
Data That Destroys the Famine Narrative
Considering the enormous quantities of food that have been entering Gaza, it should not be surprising that there was no actual famine. According to the World Food Programme, sustaining Gaza's estimated population of 2.1 million people requires approximately 62,000 metric tons of food per month. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli body overseeing civilian affairs in Gaza, has meticulously tracked food aid volumes, and published transparent, detailed reports.
From March through December 2024, 788,216 tons of food aid entered Gaza — an average of 78,821 tons per month, more than 25% above the WFP's stated threshold.
On January 19, 2025, one day before the second hostage‐release ceasefire went into effect, humanitarian aid shipments surged. January saw 164,148 tons of food enter Gaza, more than twice the 2024 monthly average. February was even higher with a whopping 216,075 tons of food aid.
Together, this 380,223 tons over January and February 2025 was enough to provide five months' worth of food — through the end of May — at the levels of the previous ten months. Using the WFP requirement of 62,000 tons, the food from January and February was sufficient to last through June.
It is important to note that these figures are not estimates. They are publicly available, verifiable numbers released by COGAT and monitored by international agencies.
On March 2, 2025, with the ceasefire-hostage release deal falling apart, Israel stopped allowing aid into Gaza. Despite the massive quantities of food that had just entered Gaza in the previous two months, within days the starvation claims resumed. Already on March 19, Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency ran the headline, "Gaza officially enters first stage of famine amid Israeli blockade."
The UN was not far behind. On April 25, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini declared, "Children are starving in Gaza." And on April 28, the UN's official website stated, "Gazans face hunger crisis as aid blockade nears two months."
Then in May 2025, the BBC reported: "Gaza subjected to forced starvation, top UN official tells BBC."
Famously, on May 20, 2025, Tom Fletcher, head of the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told BBC Radio that "there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them." While this claim was walked back by the UN, the narrative damage was done.
Hamas: The Real Obstruction
The food was entering Gaza — far above the minimum necessary — so why was there any hunger at all? The answer is straightforward: Hamas has weaponized food. The terrorist group that controls Gaza has systematically blocked, diverted, looted, hoarded, and resold humanitarian aid at exorbitant prices.
Multiple verified reports, including videos and testimonies from Gazan civilians, as well as admissions from UN agencies, show that Hamas and their affiliated vendors have seized the vast majority of aid shipments. Civilians have reported food being resold at inflated prices or being distributed only to Hamas loyalists. The UN has admitted that "nearly 90%" of the aid it sent to Gaza was " Intercepted' Before Reaching [its] Intended Recipients".
One Gazan mother told the BBC, "I swear I didn't see any part of the aid. It enters Gaza — but people steal it, and it disappears." This is not an isolated incident. It is the norm under Hamas rule. Yet, UN agencies and media outlets persist in blaming Israel, not the entity actively stealing the aid.
Hamas' incentives to steal and withhold food from the civilian population are manifold. Mainly, Hamas sold the food that was meant to be given to civilians at no charge, in order to fund its continued operations. It is estimated that Hamas has profited by roughly $500 million from sales of stolen humanitarian aid. Hoarding also keeps the prices high by limiting the supply available for purchase — a key aim of this tactic. High prices are also necessary for the success of Hamas' information warfare. Without scarcity on the street, prices would drop and undermine the starvation narrative.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: Effective Aid Distribution that Hamas Will Not Tolerate
Late May 2025 saw the inauguration of a new system for distribution of aid: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Operating four sites in the southern and central Gaza Strip, the GHF is an American project operating in close coordination with Israeli authorities. The purpose of the GHF is to deliver food aid directly to individual Gazan families while bypassing Hamas-controlled distribution networks. The GHF operates with a high level of logistical transparency, tracking aid deliveries with barcodes and GPS to ensure that food reaches its intended recipients.
According to a detailed report dated August 1, 2025, by Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society, within a few weeks of starting operations on the ground in Gaza, the GHF was delivering up to 2.5 million meals per day directly to Gazan civilians:
"By mid-July, the cumulative meals delivered surpassed 52 million over approximately 5–6 weeks, and by the end of July, this figure was even higher (GHF reported over 100 million meals delivered by late July)."
The success of this model, circumventing Hamas's control, proved a threat not only to Hamas's grip on humanitarian aid but also to the UN agencies that had proven ineffective in ensuring safe, reliable distribution. "[S]o who's doing the killing?," asked US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, adding:
"That's a good question. You honestly think it's some U.S. contractors, or it's the IDF just gunning people down. Or is it Hamas... because it's business to them. If they can keep people from getting the free food, then they can sell the food that was supposed to be given to them for free. That's what no one seems to be wanting to talk about. Why not?"
The GHF exposed the falsity of the narrative that Israel was the cause of hunger in Gaza.
Hamas responded with threats and then violence. Hamas attacked distribution centers and intimidated aid recipients. The GHF has come under fire — literally — from Hamas and some local clans loyal to Hamas, even murdering Gazans who were working for GHF. At the same time, the UN and its agencies have launched an international pressure campaign on Israel to revert to delivery of aid only through UN-related groups. Notably, when Hamas rejected a recent ceasefire, they stated that one of their demands for a deal is that the GHF be completely dismantled.
At the same time, a disinformation campaign was launched, with near daily false claims in international media that the IDF is shooting Gazans coming to the GHF distribution sites, killing some. There is even a locked, uneditable Wikipedia pagetitled "2025 Gaza Strip aid distribution killings" which reports as fact:
"Since 27 May 2025, amid a famine in Gaza strip, more than 1,965 Palestinian civilians seeking aid have been killed and thousands more have been wounded in the Gaza Strip when being fired upon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), armed gangs, and contractors hired by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)."
In late June and July 2025, international media — including the BBC and PBS — amplified claims by former GHF contractor Anthony "Tony" Aguilar, who alleged he witnessed "war crimes" and indiscriminate use of force by the IDF soldiers contractors at aid sites in Gaza. However, the GHF swiftly pushed back, stating that Aguilar had been fired on June 13 for poor performance, erratic behavior and volatile conflicts with staff. The GHF also accused him of fabricating and backdating documents to support his claims. These charges were reported by outlets such as The Times of Israel, which described GHF's presentation of file metadata evidence as discrediting Aguilar's account. Regardless of Aguilar's questionable credibility, legacy media outlets uncritically reported his "testimony" as if it were an unbiased report by a courageous whistleblower.
The idea that the IDF would shoot civilians collecting aid from an apparatus the Israelis themselves helped to implement is laughable on its face. Israel's entire strategic goal in facilitating the GHF's aid delivery is to separate the daily needs of Gazans from Hamas and from areas under Hamas control. Why would the IDF attack Gazan civilians coming to the distribution sites?
The daily claims of deaths at from IDF fire distribution sites always come from staff at Hamas-controlled hospitals or unverified eyewitness testimonies. There has yet to be even a single video clip of such an incident occurring, even as virtually every move anyone makes in Gaza is recorded on a smartphone and shared widely. Were it the case that IDF soldiers actually killed a single civilian at an aid distribution site, there would be some visual evidence to support this claim.
The Weaponization of Hunger
Hamas exemplifies a tactic described by Colonel John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point. "When a group causes starvation among its own population," he recently wrote of Hamas, "it is weaponizing that deprivation to gain political and moral leverage."
In late July 2025, it was widely reported that close to 1,000 truckloads of food aid that had already been allowed into Gaza were sitting untouched, waiting for UN-affiliated contractors to pick it up. The quantity of food sitting out in the sun was sufficient to feed Gaza for weeks. When the UN agencies claimed logistical and security problems picking up the aid, the GHF offered to help secure its delivery to the people at no charge. The UN refused the offer.
Hamas' tactic of starving the civilian population of Gaza for political gain should not surprise anyone. Just as Hamas places rocket launchers in schools and stores weapons in hospitals, it hoards food and obstructs aid — not in spite of the suffering it causes, but because of it. The reports of hungry children and the exorbitant prices of food in the Gaza markets are meant to incite international outrage — not against Hamas, but against Israel.
Exploiting Sick Children for Propaganda
Perhaps the most emotionally manipulative aspect of the starvation narrative is the use of sick children in media campaigns. Three high-profile cases reveal how misleading and staged these portrayals can be.
The first is the instance of Wateen Abu Amouna, featured by the BBC. Photos showed the infant wrapped in a garbage bag, with claims that no diapers or formula were available. Yet other videos show the same baby being bottle-fed and wearing diapers, and the mother appeared healthy. These contradictions were never addressed.
Then there is the instance of Osama al-Raqab. The Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano published a front-page photo of what looks like a severely malnourished child under the headline "If This is a Child?" The accompanying story included an interview with Francesca Albanese, the UN "Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories." Albanese accused the Italian government of being complicit in what she called Israel's "starvation policy." It turns out that the child suffers from cystic fibrosis and has been in Italy undergoing medical treatment since early June. The picture, taken in April, ran on the front page in late July.
The most celebrated case is that of Mohammed al-Ma'touq, featured in the New York Times. Portrayed as a victim of famine, the child actually suffers from a severe genetic disorder. A tightly-cropped photo of the emaciated boy lovingly held in his mother's arms — arranged to resemble classical artistic renditions of Christian "pietà" iconography — went viral and created the iconic visual of starvation in Gaza, even as the boy's condition had nothing to do with food shortages. Later, when the full, uncropped, photo leaked, Mohammed's obviously well-fed brother, appearing completely healthy, was seen standing next to him. While the New York Times ran the deceptive cropped photo on its front page, seen by tens of millions of people, the "retraction" admitting the error was posted only on the @NYTimesPR X account, which has fewer than 100,000 followers.
Dr. John Borowski, a humanitarian physician who has "worked in refeeding centers in refugee camps and rural hospitals in war and in peace -- in Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe and India," recently pointed out that real famine conditions look dramatically different from what is seen in Gaza. In his field experience, famines result "hundreds of malnourished children," not isolated cases. By contrast, images coming out of Gaza show individual sick children whose conditions are more consistent with chronic illness, such as cerebral palsy or cancer, than with starvation. Borowski adds:
"The regular photos of masses of children show kids that look miserable and dirty, but not at all malnourished. (You can look at their average MUAC - mid-upper arm circumference and see that it is OK). Many adults seem to even be overweight - when food is scarce everyone gets skinny. Also pictures of an individual child with an abnormal MUAC have been used to 'prove' malnutrition, but 3% of normal well fed kids have an abnormal MUAC... so this is deliberate disinformation...
The latest Hamas sourced "death toll" from malnutrition reports twice as many adults as children dying from malnutrition. This makes absolutely no sense. 2/3 of famine deaths "should" be children, especially in such a young population where 50% are under 18.
These distortions reinforce the conclusion that much of the famine "information" is built on false visuals and flawed data, deliberately constructed to inflame outrage against Israel .
A Deliberate Hoax
For nearly two years, the world has been bombarded with claims of looming starvation and then full-blown famine in Gaza. But the facts — mortality data, aid volumes, eyewitness accounts — tell a different story. There is no Israeli-caused famine in Gaza, and there never was.
This hoax has paid great dividends for Hamas, and is likely a reason – along with the announcement by French President Emmanuel Macron that he would recognize a Palestinian state, which gave Hamas renewed hope that they could win the war – that they recently walked away from a ceasefire–hostage release deal that looked all but complete.
Macron's pledge to recognize a Palestinian state – quickly joined by the UK, Canada and Australia – and the most recent surge in aid into Hamas-controlled areas through airdrops and increases in trucks entering Gaza, together with the aggressive demonization of Israel in the media and diplomatic arena, have led Hamas to believe that time is on their side.
Hamas knows that it has no chance of beating the Israel militarily, but its propaganda war has been a smashing success. If all it takes is keeping Gaza's civilians hungry and desperate, that is a price Hamas is more than happy to pay.
Pesach Wolicki is co-host of the "Shoulder to Shoulder" podcast.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment