The Gaza Starvation Lie

Ryan Grim, a “journalist” for the pro-Hamas propaganda site Drop Site News, claimed on Friday that the Israeli government “planned very specifically to cut off food” to Gaza, “and then when re-opening it, to control it militarily and have 4 aid sites for 2 million people. This was a well thought out plan agreed to at the highest levels.” To that, an X user replied: “lol Ryan is lying to you all. the aid is in Gaza waiting for the UN to pick it up. They wont do it.”

That was indeed the case, as AIPAC noted: “The food, medicine and aid are IN Gaza. The @UN won’t distribute it. Hundreds of truckloads are sitting there. The trucks are loaded. Demand they deliver. Yesterday, Hamas again rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that Israel accepted. Where’s your unequivocal condemnation?” Yet once again, as Mark Twain pointed out so long ago, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The claim that Gazans were suffering from mass starvation at the hands of Israel fit the narrative of the leftist political and media elites, which have been avid to portray the Israelis as evil white “settler-colonialists” oppressing the brown Palestinians.

Columnist Hillel Fuld said: “950 truckloads of aid are currently sitting in Gaza, awaiting pickup and distribution by international organizations. Starvation in Gaza, my tuchus! And whatever hunger there is there is on Hamas and the UN that refuses to distribute all this food.” The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reported Thursday: “The United Nations rejected offers by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians that is sitting undelivered inside the Gaza Strip despite the United Nations’ own warnings about widespread hunger. ‘We’ve been sounding the alarm for weeks on the need for more aid in Gaza while we’ve seen aid by the UN and other organizations being piled near the borders but not being delivered,’ GHF Interim Director John Acree said.”

British Colonel Richard Kemp drew back the veil on why the UN would do such a thing: “Of course UN & NGOs reject US-Israel plan to supply humanitarian aid to Gaza with measures to prevent its seizure by Hamas. These entities would rather deny food to civilians than see Hamas deprived of control as well as the funding it extorts from sale of free aid.” This is all about saving Hamas, even if Gazan children have to die unwittingly and unwillingly for the cause.

No such deaths would be necessary; all could be prevented. The Jerusalem Post reported Saturday that “approximately 90 food trucks were unloaded at aid crossings, and over 100 were collected by the UN and international organizations from the Gaza side and distributed in Gaza; however, hundreds of trucks still await pickup, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said on Saturday.”

As all this was happening, the usual divide emerged between the truth and the left’s spin on it. The UN, true to form, took Hamas’ word uncritically as fact: “The UN’s World Food Program claimed that ‘one in three people in the Gaza Strip has gone days without eating’, citing information provided by Hamas-controlled Gaza’s Ministry of Health.” Back in the real world, “the IDF acknowledged on Friday that while there is no starvation in Gaza, food security is at a dangerous, sensitive point and that it is working hard to keep food security balanced.”

The IDF is also trying to persuade the UN to stop its efforts on behalf of Hamas and allow the people of Gaza to be fed: “At this time, the IDF is attempting to persuade the UN and other aid organizations to dispatch approximately 900 aid trucks to distribution points. The military has already approved the aid trucks, and they are waiting on the other side on the Gaza side of the border.”

Meanwhile, there were telling indications that the entire crisis was more propaganda than fact. A photo of an allegedly starving Palestinian child in his mother’s arms was widely distributed. The only problem was that mom was at least fifty pounds overweight; why didn’t she share any of her food with her poor starving son? There were so many such photos that Dr. Eli David spelled out the stark choices they presented: “In all reports about the ‘starvation in Gaza’ they talk about hungry children, but the adults look well-fed or even overweight. There are only two explanations: 1. Adults in Gaza eat all the food and starve their children 2. This starvation story is another Hamas lie.”

The UK’s Daily Express published a lurid cover photo of what was purportedly a starving Gazan child, but many people pointed out that the child was actually suffering from a congenital disease.

As always, however, the facts simply didn’t matter. All that matter was furthering the leftist narrative, so as to move the world a step closer to accepting Israel’s destruction. That was the real goal behind all the crocodile tears, handwringing and hysteria over a population that was not actually starving.

UPDATE:

Johnnie Moore, now with the Gaza Health Foundation: Since we began our operations in May, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has repeatedly called for the U.N. and its affiliate agencies to combine efforts with us to feed the people of Gaza. We have a shared goal of delivering food to the people who need it and our organization has the delivery mechanism to achieve this because of the level of security we provide. Unfortunately, we have been met not only with silence but with smears. Rather than acknowledging the broader systemic failures affecting all aid groups, U.N. spokespeople and U.N.-aligned organizations have attacked the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for its association with Israel and falsely cast us as endangering needy people in Gaza. These efforts to deflect blame are disingenuous and dangerous. Such claims erode public trust in humanitarian organizations and distract from the real priority: getting food to civilians in need (Wall Street Journal).

New York Sun: Rejecting claims of mass starvation in Gaza as a “false campaign promoted by Hamas,” Israel’s Defense Forces announced it is temporarily pausing some military actions in the strip to create humanitarian corridors to enable safe movement of United Nations convoys delivering food aid. Following huge blowback of Israel’s attempts to deliver aid to Gaza through its American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Israel relented over the weekend on its limitations for routes used by United Nations’ and other aid trucks entering Gaza (New York Sun).