The United Nations has long played the fabled boy who cried “wolf,” claiming without evidence that Israel is guilty of allowing and even causing a famine in Gaza, but that doesn’t mean that Israel supporters ought to deny that the Strip is free of starvation, the dermatopathologist and analyst Avi Bitterman told JNS.
Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who is Jewish, drew reproach, including from U.S. Jewish organizations, for stating last month, “Release the hostages. Until then, starve away.”
“Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Sunday. “We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza. Otherwise, there would be no Gazans.”
Bitterman told JNS that denying starvation in the Strip opens the Jewish state up to criticism.
“That’s real starvation stuff,” U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday, alongside U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Turnberry, Scotland. “I see it, and you can’t fake that.”
“If you put yourself in a situation where you say ‘there’s no starvation,’ then any case of starvation is going to discredit you,” Bitterman told JNS. “Obviously, there are cases of starvation, like the more vulnerable aspects of the population, with pre-existing conditions will be more vulnerable to starvation.”
“But there are cases of starvation that don’t have pre-existing conditions,” the researcher said. “The rates of starvation aren’t at the level that are defined as ‘famine’ conditions, though, and that’s a distinction.”
Bitterman, who has analyzed trends in aid to Gaza throughout the war, penned a 725-word post on social media on July 24, in which he wrote that he is pro-Israel and noted that the United Nations and other ‘humanitarian’ institutions and the media “have essentially zero concern for truth or anything resembling reality.”
“As I have publicly documented extensively, these institutions repeatedly fabricated data, then lied about their own data they fabricated, made up nonsense on the spot, all completely shamelessly knowing they wouldn’t be questioned,” he wrote.
“That all being said, the fable of the boy who cried wolf has an important moral, which is not that wolves don’t exist and will never attack anyone. Rather, it is precisely because wolves do exist and will eventually attack that makes it so important to not cry ‘wolf,’” he wrote. “Ideally, even when the United Nations cries ‘wolf’ and a wolf actually happens to finally be there, we should still be ready for that.”
Bitterman told JNS that the United Nations and “every ‘humanitarian’ organization has been claiming that we’re on the verge of ‘famine.’”
“That’s all that’s ever been said. It never materialized, not just because the conditions changed but also because the underlying assumptions and models and data that they used were just wrong,” he told JNS. “It was just false, either through incompetence or malice.”
‘A need to increase aid’
On social media, Bitterman cited data from Hebrew University economics historian Yannay Spitzer, which suggests that the prices of important staple foods in Gaza have skyrocketed, with many reaching levels previously unseen during the war.
There is a need to increase aid operations, make it safer for people to access aid sites and “force” the delivery of idle supplies, which aid organizations don’t retrieve inside Gaza, including seizing it, Bitterman stated.
Five days later, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which has ties to the United Nations, published a Gaza alert, which stated “worst-case scenario of famine unfolding in the Gaza Strip.”
That headline drew coverage in the international press, including a Washington Post headline, “Famine unfolding across Gaza, says global hunger monitor,” and the BBC story, “Famine ‘currently playing out’ in Gaza, UN-backed experts warn.”
Bitterman told JNS that the IPC headline doesn’t reflect its reporting and data, which shows undeniable suffering and claims a reasonable probability that famine in some areas could occur at some point through the end of September, he said.
But the alert didn’t say that there is an ongoing famine or even that famine is the likeliest scenario, just that there is a realistic chance that it could occur absent a change in conditions in the Strip, he said.
The IPC states that “mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths” and that the “latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.”
Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, talked to reporters on the same day that the IPC released its alert, and shortly before two high-ranking U.N. World Food Programme staffers briefed the media.
Since Israel implemented humanitarian pauses to allow for more aid to be distributed at the beginning of the week, “market monitoring shows prices for basic goods are starting to drop, which could point to better operating conditions if aid flows further increase and supplies saturate the area,” Haq told reporters.
‘Situation of concern’
JNS asked why the IPC’s alert should be taken seriously, given past issues with its data and projections.
Jean-Martin Bauer, director of food security and nutrition assessments at the U.N.’s World Food Programme, told JNS that “the projections that you have in the IPC report, they incorporate some uncertainty.”
“Things change very rapidly on the ground as to whether there’s a pause,” he said. “When there’s a pause, as I said earlier, the situation gets a lot better.”
“What I’m trying to say here is that the data that we have, and this is evidence. This is robust data that has been collected recently, and that’s corroborated and well explained in the report that you’ve received,” Bauer told JNS, which “shows that we’re in a situation of a huge concern. We’re in a situation of an emerging famine.”
The World Food Programme also noted “what we’re seeing on our TV screens.” It wasn’t immediately clear to what he was referring. There have been photographs, including ones that have required corrections, purporting to show starving civilians in Gaza, but there has been scant video evidence that shows such allegations.
Mark Zlochin, a former artificial intelligence researcher and self-described “incorrigible data analysis geek,” has also pored over data from Gaza.
“As a general remark, there are indeed some indicators showing a negative trend,” he told JNS. “The malnutrition rates among children seem to have been rising, especially in Gaza City, though for July, we only have raw data that is not age-adjusted.”
Age adjustments could have a significant impact on the final results, given that younger children naturally tend to be smaller, he told JNS.
“We did see a beginning of a downtrend for some basic items, like flour or oil, in June, but we don’t have a confirmation for this downtrend in July yet,” Zlochin told JNS. “There is some anecdotal evidence that after the United Nations started clearing the backlog at the border, the prices went further down.”
