Mainstream media are so eager to defame Israel that they’ll seize any defamatory news, then rush it to publication without fact-checking. Just last week, the U.N. humanitarian and relief coordinator, Tom Fletcher, stated, with no evidence, that there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours” if Israel did not allow food into Gaza immediately.
First, the BBC, then The New York Times, ABC News, Time magazine and NBC News repeated the lie. A week later, no such deaths have been verified. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which monitors food security worldwide, has warned of famine in Gaza ever since war broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but has still not declared famine there.
Likewise, a senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces, which has thousands of boots on the ground in the coastal strip, maintains: “There is no famine in Gaza, we’re not even close to that.” The IDF is working to create accessible, safe zones in Gaza and an identification system to ensure food aid reaches non-combatants.
While no one is denying that life is tragically dangerous and difficult in Gaza or even that hunger is a problem, Western nations continue to complain hyperbolically that Israel is killing and starving Gaza’s citizens. At the same time, U.N. humanitarian aid organizations and NGOs are refusing to assist the new U.S.-Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, saying it compromises their core principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence.
However, in the past, food shipped into Gaza under the auspices of the United Nations and others was notoriously hijacked by Hamas, and the food either kept by the terrorist group or sold on the black market, forcing Gaza citizens to pay outrageous prices for it.
Leaders of U.N. humanitarian organizations apparently believe that preventing Hamas from stealing food aid compromises their neutrality, impartiality and independence. Likewise, cooperating with the United States and Israel in efforts to ensure Gaza’s Palestinians receive free food using a safe, fair and orderly system seemingly violates those same principles.
Ironically, now Hamas is ordering Gazans not to accept GHF-supplied food to sabotage the new aid mechanism, preferring to see their people starve rather than accept American or Israeli help.
Meanwhile, mainstream media have continued to trumpet the Gaza famine blood libel against Israel for nearly 20 months now while simultaneously ignoring one of the world’s greatest famines—in war-torn Sudan—where some 26 million people are starving to death.
There is no famine in Gaza, and there never was. Since the war began, aid agencies have repeatedly warned of famine in Gaza. In March 2024, for example, IPC reported that famine “was projected and imminent.” Three months later, however, IPC proclaimed, “The available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.” In November 2024, IPC again issued a warning of impending famine in Gaza. But this, too, turned out to be a false alarm. To this day, the IPC has not declared a famine in the Gaza Strip.
Yet Israel is still accused of intentionally starving and killing Gaza’s citizens. Indeed, the International Criminal Court charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly using starvation as a method of war against the Palestinians, and issued warrants for their arrest.
Last month, the governments of the United Kingdom, France and Canada issued a joint statement demanding that Israel stop its military campaign in Gaza and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, which were imposed by Israel to prevent Hamas from stealing that aid. The statement warned these countries would take “further concrete actions” if Israel did not accede to their demands.
U.N. organizations and NGOs complain about the problem, but refuse to be part of the solution. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that the new GHF-led aid mechanism “violates humanitarian principles by using aid as a tool in Israel’s broader efforts to depopulate areas of Gaza,” and called for the “existing system” to be restored.
This “existing system” was what allowed Hamas to hijack aid meant for ordinary citizens—a war crime. Yet the United Nations hypocritically accuses Israel of using aid as a tool of war. God forbid the United Nations would assist democratic Israel in defeating the savage terror group that started the war with a bloody massacre and kidnappings.
Hamas tries to sabotage aid efforts. The terrorist group has threatened Gazans who go to GHF aid distribution centers and tried to block them from doing so. Furthermore, Hamas is peddling a false narrative of Gazans being killed by Israeli troops while waiting for aid at the distribution centers, hence the recent Al Jazeera headline, “‘Heinous crime’ Israel kills 10 desperate aid seekers in Gaza in 48 hours.” In fact, according to GHF, reports of mass injuries and deaths originate from Hamas, and they are patently false.
Mainstream media parrot blood libels against Israel, yet virtually ignore the world’s greatest famine in Sudan. Unlike in Gaza, IPC has declared a famine in several parts of Sudan, where an estimated 26 million people are facing starvation. Yet the media barely provide coverage of this humanitarian disaster. For example, whereas the BBC has published some 48 articles on a fake famine in Gaza between Oct. 9, 2023, and May 19, 2025, it has published just six on an actual famine in Sudan in the same period.
Why are the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations paralyzed at the prospect of cooperating with the United States and Israel, who are endeavoring to defeat a brutal war criminal? We have to ask whether “humanitarian impartiality” is not a perverse moral value when it causes organizations to avoid supporting a defender against belligerent terrorists who purposely put their own people at mortal risk, illegally hold civilian hostages and refuse to surrender.
Americans, Israelis and surely a majority of the world’s people would have greater respect for the United Nations and other humanitarian NGOs if they simply did their jobs of providing aid to needy people, even if that requires opposing Hamas’s abominable behavior on the battlefield and its tyranny of more than 2 million local Palestinians.
Originally published by Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME).