This Is The Reality

Yea, in the very Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Konyndyk writes:

For months, a chorus of denial has sought to drown out the reality of famine in Gaza. The Israeli government and an online army of armchair “experts” have insisted that images of emaciated children in Gaza are staged, reports of hunger are exaggerated, and claims of famine are hyperbolic.

As someone who has directed famine response efforts for South Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, I can tell you plainly: this is more than false, it is active disinformation.

Last week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC) formally confirmed famine in Gaza for the first time. Famine is a technical classification under the IPC, the gold-standard system used by governments, aid agencies, and the UN for decades to assess hunger emergencies. It relies on rigorous data and established benchmarks from malnutrition screenings, mortality surveys, market analyses, and food availability studies.

When famine is declared, it means large numbers of people are unable to access enough food, child malnutrition is rising sharply, and people are dying as a direct result. That is the reality of Gaza today. A famine declaration is not an anticipatory warning; it means that a deadly trajectory has already taken hold.

Here are seven common tropes the famine deniers are parroting – and why they’re wrong.

1. The IPC moved the goalposts to declare famine in Gaza

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has claimed that the IPC “twisted its own rules and ignored its own criteria just to produce false accusations against Israel”.

This is a misreading of longstanding technical guidance used to confirm famine conditions. The guidance provides two ways of assessing malnutrition – systematic weight-for-height assessment (WHZ), or mid-upper-arm circumference screening (MUAC). Because these measure different physical characteristics, they have different population thresholds for famine: 30 per cent for WHZ and 15 per cent for MUAC. Both are valid, and indeed this same 15 per cent MUAC threshold was used when issuing a famine declaration in Sudan last year, as well as in South Sudan in 2020 and 2017 (and of course, no one batted an eyelash then).

2. That starving child is sitting next to a parent who isn’t starving

The nutritional needs of growing children make them far more vulnerable to starvation than adults. They invariably starve earlier. As Dr Andrew Prentice, professor of international nutrition at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine told The Telegraph recently, a baby needs four times more calories per kilogram of body weight than an adult.

In every hunger emergency I have worked on, children succumbed first, while their parents hung on longer. A skeletal child beside an exhausted but still-breathing parent is a hallmark of famine, not evidence against it.

3. That starving person has a pre-existing condition, so it’s not real starvation

This line of argument is as callous as it is inaccurate. People with underlying conditions always suffer first when hunger sets in. That vulnerability is not a rebuttal of famine; it is a feature of how famine kills and who it hits first. And in any case – we should not accept starvation-with-complications as somehow acceptable.

4. There’s food in the market

Famine has never meant the total absence of food. It occurs when people lack the means to access sufficient sustenance. In every famine, some people can access food even while others cannot – often due to a combination of limited supply, extreme costs, or geographic barriers. In Gaza, food prices have skyrocketed beyond reach for most families, with costs of some staples rising as much as ten to fifteen thousand per cent. The outcome is that almost one in three Gazans report going days at a time without eating.

5. Plenty of food has gone in, Hamas is just stealing it

In March and April, no food entered Gaza under Israel’s full blockade. Since then, there has only been a trickle, well short of the bare minimum needed to address cumulative food deficits. Furthermore there is no credible evidence that Hamas has systematically stolen aid from the UN or major NGOs. Even Jack Lew, the former US ambassador in Jerusalem, recently wrote that he never saw evidence of systematic diversion and that Israeli officials never raised such concerns with him – publicly or privately.

6. Israel allows aid to enter but the UN refuses to distribute it

Israel tightly controls every UN truck that enters and moves inside Gaza. Israel does allow a symbolic volume of aid to cross just inside the Kerem Shalom border crossing, but then forces the UN to jump through an absurdly arduous set of bureaucratic hoops in order to collect and distribute it – all while inviting influencers and journalists to gawk at the stockpiled aid. The reality is that UN distribution is blocked by the very military restrictions Israel itself imposes.

For example, in order to retrieve aid from a border crossing, the UN has to get permission for its trucks to enter zones controlled by the military. But getting these permissions is fraught with delay and difficulty. The UN said that in May, June and July, more than half its movement requests – 506 out of 894 – were either delayed or denied outright by the military.

7. Humanitarians have been warning of famine for months – you are just crying wolf

Those warnings were accurate – as last week’s confirmation proves. Each time Gaza neared the famine threshold, experts would raise the alarm, diplomatic pressure would increase, and Israel would ease restrictions just enough to avert a tipping point. This time, they did not. By keeping families perpetually on the edge of famine since spring last year, Israeli policy eroded every coping mechanism people had left. When the blockade tightened in March and April, it lit the fuse, and famine is now spreading like wildfire.

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As Alex de Waal, one of the world’s foremost famine scholars, notes, these tropes all come from the same, tired playbook that we have seen in past famines.

The confirmation of famine in Gaza must be taken seriously. Israel must allow unfettered aid access in Gaza. And all global leaders must deploy any leverage at their disposal to force the Israeli government to enable a robust UN-led famine response.

The question is not whether Gaza is facing famine. It is. The question is what the world will do to act now before thousands more die a cruel and preventable death.