The Famine Libel and What it Tells Us
Dr Sheree Trotter
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 which facilitates the entry of hundreds of trucks of aid into Gaza daily. Israeli experts have claimed that 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.
Since the beginning of the war, the UN has been releasing reports and updates regarding 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 the Strip. UNRWA collects data only on aid entering Gaza 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 air-dropped into the Gaza Strip nor 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 Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings collected by other aid organizations when UNRWA representatives are not present at the crossings. In this way, 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 there was a larger volume of goods from the private sector. 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 organisation’s neutrality in the Gaza war has been severely compromised. UNRWA staff were involved in the brutal 7 October attack on Israel as terrorists. A Wall Street Journal reported that out of 12,000 UNRWA employees, 1,200 (10%; 23% of all male employed) are ‘operatives’ of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to these militant groups.
UN Watch found widespread support for the October 7th 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 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 towards Jews.
The famine myth is only one of many false allegations that have emerged over the course of 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 500 died. This was a complete fabrication. An Islamic Jihad rocket had misfired and hit the adjacent carpark resulting in a much smaller number of casualties.
Statistics on casualties issued from 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 Modern War Institute at West Point, said that in contrast to claims from Western leaders, including Biden, the “steps that Israel has taken to prevent casualties is historic in comparison to all these other wars.” He outlined how the Israeli military took measures that no other military, including the U.S., had previously taken during 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, 4 to 5 times lower than numbers produced by the US and its allies (such as in Iraq and Afghanistan), and lower than any urban warfare scenario that has ever been 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 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 that emanates 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, to its agenda. Meanwhile, western academia has been caught up in a decolonisation frenzy that views anything emanating from the West as inherently evil and so 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, such as 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 of the nations. Just as the Jew has been called the canary in the coalmine, the early warning system of the ill-health of the nation, so Israel functions in much the same way. Israel’s battle is for civilisation against barbarism, the value of life versus the glorification of death. For these radical 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 recognise 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.