The experts have officially declared that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip. But what exactly counts as a famine? And who judges whether or not the standard has been met?
As world leaders stream into New York City this month to open a new session of the U.N. General Assembly, debate about Gaza will be intense and famine will be at the center of it. Yet a closer look at the famine declaration exposes multiple red flags in the fine print, which indicate the declaration was neither impartial nor methodologically sound.
The most influential voice on the question of famine belongs to a little-known international organization, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. Its findings drive global media coverage. The Associated Press calls it “the world’s leading authority on food crises.” The BBC calls it “the world’s leading hunger monitor.”
The IPC employs a carefully constructed methodology, and leading scholars review its assessments. Yet for all this apparent rigor, there remains ample space within IPC guidelines for political preferences to shape its conclusions. Burrow into the IPC’s declaration of famine in Gaza, and one begins to see how the organization reached a very flawed conclusion while bending its own rules to the breaking point.
The debate over the IPC’s findings is not merely academic. Israel faces accusations of genocide before the International Court of Justice, and the centerpiece of the indictment is the charge that Israel is starving Gaza to death. Likewise, deliberate starvation is the main crime with which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been charged by the International Criminal Court. The IPC does not explicitly assign responsibility for the lack of food in Gaza, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. There is extensive criticism of those who allegedly restrict the delivery of aid into Gaza, but negligible discussion of why 87% of aid trucks never reach their intended destination, according to U.N. data.
The IPC’s Aug. 22 assessment of Gaza contends, “Famine is a race against time.” Without urgent and massive aid, “avoidable deaths will increase exponentially.” Death by starvation is integral to the IPC definition of famine. As the organization’s website and fact sheets explain, one of the three pillars of that definition is a daily mortality rate of two adults or four children per 10,000 residents, which is the same as saying 200 adults or 400 children per million residents. If the whole of Gaza were afflicted, one should observe just under 400 adults or 800 children perishing per day from deprivation. (More later about the other two pillars of the IPC definition.)
Credible information shows that starvation is claiming some lives in Gaza. In early August, the head of the World Health Organization reported 99 deaths from malnutrition since the beginning of the year, including 29 children under age 5. He called this a likely underestimate. At about the same time, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza put the toll at 212 individuals, including 98 children. Images of a single child wasting away are heart-wrenching, and the thought of dozens suffering that way is unbearable; yet one purpose of the IPC’s detailed methodology is to ensure that data triumphs over emotion.
At present, the IPC only considers the Gaza Governorate area, one of four in the coastal strip, to be in a state of famine, although it projects two more will cross the threshold “in the coming weeks.” (There is insufficient data to assess the fourth.) The IPC estimates there are now 937,000 residents in the Gaza Governorate, so the threshold for famine would be a mortality rate of 187 adults per day or 374 children.
As the numbers indicate, the loss of life from malnutrition is more than two orders of magnitude below the threshold. We are seeing about one death per day from hunger, not hundreds. If that is the case, how could the IPC have declared a famine? And how could the world’s leading news outlets have reported the IPC’s findings without raising a red flag?
The answer to this question rests on the distinction between “solid evidence” of a famine as opposed to just “reasonable evidence.” To reach a solid finding, the IPC guidelines require all three pillars of its definition be met. In addition to the requisite mortality rate, one-fifth of households must face “an extreme lack of food” while 30% of children suffer acute malnutrition. To reach a reasonable finding, only two of the three thresholds must be met, while analysts may “assess from the broader evidence” that the third has also been met, even if the data do not show it. This is the mile-wide loophole through which the Gaza famine declaration has been driven.
The IPC analysis infers that the combination of insufficient food, water, health care and sanitation must be causing far more loss of life than the data show. These deaths are not showing up in the data, they say, because of Gaza’s “collapsed monitoring systems.”
Yet the mortality monitoring system has not collapsed. The Gaza Ministry of Health has invested tremendous effort in tracking the death toll. It has released lists that provide the names, ages and personal ID numbers of more than 50,000 deceased individuals. Critics have pointed to flaws in the ministry’s data and methodology that reflect an apparent effort to inflate the death toll. Yet the IPC analysis rests on the belief that the ministry is failing to report hundreds of actual deaths every day.
One might expect the extensive media coverage of the IPC’s findings to address this issue. The publication of its latest assessment generated coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Reuters, the Associated Press, Bloomberg and many other media outlets. Several outlets carefully noted that the mortality threshold is two adults per day, or four children, per 10,000. Yet thinking in units of 10,000 residents is not typical, and none of the outlets employ the necessary bit of arithmetic to show that this translates into an expectation of nearly 200 deaths per day in Gaza. If they did, it might be obvious that a great analytical leap was necessary to meet the IPC threshold for famine.
This is not the only statistical controversy afoot. A separate debate has arisen over the data showing that acute child malnutrition has passed the famine threshold. Throughout 2024 and early 2025, IPC reports on Gaza simply noted that the threshold was a 30% prevalence of child malnutrition. Then, in July, an asterisk appeared next to the 30% figure, indicating that 15% is sufficient when the gauge of malnutrition is a child’s upper arm circumference, rather than full body weight-for-height data. The IPC technical manual permits this substitution, even though arm measurements are a less reliable gauge of malnutrition. In addition, passing the 15% mark may indicate either a famine or the less severe condition of “emergency.” The manual also notes that the 15% standard is “preliminary” while “authoritative thresholds are still missing.”
The Israeli government assailed the IPC for carefully selecting its data to meet the 15% threshold. As noted, the average figure for the latter half of July was above 15%, but the figure for all of July was under 15%. One defense of the IPC argued that it made sense to focus on half-months, not whole months, since that enabled analysts to detect an intra-month trend. Resolution of this dispute may not be possible, since the IPC technical guidelines do not indicate how long the three key figures must remain above the famine threshold. One could trust the experts to determine how long the numbers must remain above the threshold, yet such discretion also opens the door to prejudice.
A third critique of the IPC is not statistical, but a question of motives. To ensure methodological rigor, the IPC has a standing Famine Review Committee (FRC) that vets the agency’s analyses of specific countries.
The FRC consists of five senior scholars and is in the process of expanding to seven members. One of the original five, Andrew Seal, a professor at University College London, is a long-time, vehement critic of the Jewish state. Seal began accusing Israel of “genocide” just three weeks after Oct. 7. Also, in the first month of the war, he asserted that Hamas’s rhetoric and actions were no worse than Israel’s. Seal even argued in January 2024 that a blockade of the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi rebels amounted to a fully legal and justified effort to enforce the terms of the 1948 U.N. Convention against genocide. This seems an unlikely motive for a pro-Tehran jihadist group, whose motto is: “Allah is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”
One of the new members of the FRC is Zeina Jamaluddine, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In February, she co-authored a journal article purporting to demonstrate that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza was underestimating the war’s death toll by 41%. That conclusion was not based on hard data, but a statistical model that employed questionable assumptions to justify higher figures. There is also a question of whether Jamaluddine’s relationship with the Gaza ministry has shaped her perspective; in a note at the end of her article, she thanked a senior ministry official “for providing hospital and survey lists essential to this study.”
Jamaluddine has deleted her account on X, but her LinkedIn feed makes clear that her sympathies lie firmly with one side in this conflict. If the FRC had a protocol for recusal to address cases where members cannot be objective, there would be a strong case for both Seal and Jamaluddine to recuse themselves.
The FRC insists that “the time for debate and hesitation has passed” because it has confirmed a famine in Gaza. Yet if it truly wanted to build consensus and end debate, it would apply its methodology in an even-handed manner and commit to greater transparency about the process. This might even facilitate the delivery of more aid by depoliticizing the efforts on which so many Gazans depend.
This piece was originally published at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
