Her er 3 gode artikler, der viser, hvordan fake news, FN og andre hamas-zombier lyver om “sult” i Gaza for at skade Israel
“The Gaza famine that wasn’t is being used against Israel”
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gaza Hamas IDF – Israel Defense Force Israel Palestinians Terrorism
The United Nations, the Biden administration and the media continue to assert that Palestinians are enduring mass starvation even after proof emerges that the claim is propaganda.
Part of the accepted narrative about the war in the Gaza Strip is that the Palestinians there are enduring abject hunger. In May, the head of the U.N. World Food Program claimed that there was a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza. Reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post in recent months have routinely noted that Palestinians are starving. Indeed, the notion that there was a genuine shortage of food in Gaza motivated President Joe Biden to order the U.S. Armed Forces to construct a floating pier and anchor it alongside the Gazan shoreline to facilitate the flow of vital supplies to those in need. On the strength of these allegations, the International Criminal Court has requested warrants for the arrest of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, largely because of the claim that they are committing war crimes by deliberately starving the Palestinians.
But what if there is no famine?
As it turns out, the U.N.’s own Famine Review Committee admitted in a report that the claims about not enough food being sent into Gaza were untrue. What’s more, this allegation, which is at the heart of the equally widespread big lie that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, is a matter of sleight of hand bookkeeping. It seems to be largely based on the fact that the number of trucks that are delivering supplies, which flow into Gaza from Israel to feed the Palestinians every day, were being undercounted with private-sector food trucks not being counted as well as other deliveries. A pertinent fact that should also be pointed out is that before Oct. 7, daily supplies of food, fuel and other material were trucked into Gaza from Israel, which gives the lie to the much-cited accusation that the Jewish state blockaded the Strip. Egypt, however, has continued to close off its border to it.
With a few exceptions, the truth about the current situation isn’t being widely reported. In Commentary, Seth Mandel wrote about the findings of the U.N. report and various analyses that pointed to the faulty data being used to justify claims of a Gaza famine. And in The Jerusalem Post, Seth Frantzman cited the work of two Columbia University professors who analyzed the data and debunked the conventional wisdom about Israel starving the Palestinians.
The food flows into Gaza
All these studies show that if there are food distribution problems in Gaza—and, obviously, an area that is the setting for an ongoing military conflict set off by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel is going to experience disruptions—it is not due to a shortage of food. The amount of items being shipped into Gaza from Israel is, as these studies show, clearly sufficient to feed the people of Gaza.
To note the truth about the famine that isn’t happening should also be placed in the context of an event that is happening. Israel’s efforts to keep aid flowing into the Strip are unprecedented in the history of armed conflict. It is a given that warring powers are not responsible for feeding their enemies, especially people under the control of hostile combatants, as is true for Palestinians who live in Rafah, where the last active Hamas military units are still in control. That is, of course, countries other than the Jewish state.
Under the circumstances, even the United States has acknowledged that few of the supplies that had entered Gaza via the floating pier had reached their intended recipients. The NGOs and so-called human-rights groups blame Israel for inspecting the trucks going into Gaza to try and stop them from being used for supplying Hamas with weapons and other war materials, the primary obstacle to the smooth flow of aid is the Palestinians themselves. But rather than admit that the entire affair has been a scandalous waste of time, money and resources—and illustrates the ill-advised and politically motivated nature of Biden’s decision to involve the United States in this fiasco—the administration continues to prevaricate about the problem. Washington prefers to chide Israel rather than say outright that the idea was a huge mistake.
As Mandel also pointed out, even the Times is burying information that undermines the famine claim inside other articles meant to buttress allegations against Israel. The newspaper wrote that there is no shortage of food in northern Gaza, the very place where it had previously asserted that famine was imminent.
Other reports point to not only the continued flow of aid from Jerusalem but also the fact that food markets are open even in areas in southern Gaza, where the fighting continues.
Hamas is stealing it
To point this out is not to deny that the situation there is extremely difficult. In wartime, food distribution networks are inevitably disrupted. But if Palestinians are suffering, then it’s nothing short of libelous to blame Israel for it. From the start of the war, armed Hamas operatives have hijacked most of the deliveries, meaning that the aid goes to the terrorists and not to the civilians they use as human shields. While media outlets often note that Hamas is accused of stealing the goods, they generally put that down only as an unsubstantiated accusation from Israel and its supporters. Given the admission that the aid that was delivered from the U.S. pier is not getting to Palestinian civilians, there is no other remotely plausible explanation for this failure other than the fact that armed Palestinians are preventing it from being handed out to their compatriots who may need it.
Adding to the problem is a new factor. In addition to Hamas itself commandeering aid shipments, gangs of smugglers—most of which are likely affiliated with the various terrorist movements—have also impeded the effort to feed Palestinians. As The Wall Street Journal reported, cigarette smuggling has become a major part of the reason why shortages exist, as criminals and aid workers who are their accomplices are using the trucks that are supposed to bring in food and fuel for transporting contraband tobacco.
Then why are so many media outlets, international organizations and the Biden administration still talking about starvation and putting the onus on a single entity for this largely fictional catastrophe?
The answer is obvious. In a war in which much of the world has accepted the canard that Israel is a “settler/colonial” and “apartheid” state against which just about any tactic employed by its enemies is justified, inflating the predicament of Palestinians in Gaza into a famine must be seen as the latest in a long list of falsehoods that have been flung at the Jewish state since Oct. 7.
This is a conflict in which some of the same outlets highlighting the dubious claims of a famine have been eager to discredit the truth about the reality of Hamas terrorism and, in particular, the atrocities, including sexual crimes, committed by Palestinians. Indeed, the members of the same anti-Israel media chorus have faithfully repeated every lie spread by the Hamas propaganda machine, including falsehoods about specific attacks and vastly inflated casualty figures for Palestinian civilians, almost all of whom are alleged to be women and children. So why should they be expected to be truthful about a famine for which little or no proof can be supplied if they were willing to lie about so much else?
As with every other falsehood put forward about Israel’s conduct of the war, the truth—even when belatedly admitted—doesn’t seem to matter. Those dedicated to the proposition that, at best, Israel and Hamas are morally equivalent will always move on to the next spurious charge without ever accounting for their previous misrepresentations and outright falsehoods.
That Israel is judged by double and triple standards applied to no other nation—let alone no other democracy at war—is nothing new.
A 21st-century blood libel
Yet the egregious nature of the Oct. 7 assault and atrocities, as well as the clear justification for Israel’s counter-offensive to eliminate the genocidal terrorist movement that carried out those crimes, seems to have impelled those who hate Israel and Jews to new depths of mendacious reporting. The intersectional left-wingers who are convinced that Israel is a nation of “white” villains victimizing Palestinian “people of color” who are inaccurately analogized to American victims of racial discrimination have no compunction about spreading these smears. The worse the actual behavior of the Palestinians, who are bent on the destruction of Israel and its people, the more it becomes imperative to flip the narrative and accuse Israel of genocide.
Every death and all of the privations suffered by Palestinian Arabs since Oct. 7 is the responsibility of the Hamas terrorists who started this war and who take every opportunity to maximize the suffering of their own people to besmirch Israel’s image. That is not only the case for Gazans hurt or killed during the fighting but true for anyone prevented from receiving aid shipped into the Strip with Israel’s permission.
The mythical Gaza famine is just the latest instance of how the Palestinians are gaslighting the world as they deliberately spiral further into an abyss of unending conflict in which they themselves are the primary victims. Sober-minded Americans who by now ought to have learned better than to trust the corporate media on this and many other issues should not be influenced by this propaganda campaign, rooted in the age-old tropes of antisemitism in which the Jews are always accused of conspiring to harm others. Stripped of the emotionalism and partisan activism that colors so much of contemporary journalism, and especially the coverage of the Middle East, the claim that Israel is starving the Palestinians should be seen for what it is: a 21st-century blood libel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
** This article was originally published on JNS.org **
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Melanie Phillips her:
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Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) It’s now quite clear that there are simply no facts at all—none—that will alter the fixed narrative of lies, distortions and blood libels with which the liberal internationalist order is demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.
The claim that Israel is starving the civilians of Gaza and causing an imminent famine has been pumped out incessantly since soon after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.
In February, the United Nations said that more than a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were “estimated to be facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and that, without action, widespread famine was “almost inevitable.”
In March, Biden administration officials told Benny Gantz—then a member of Israel’s war cabinet who was visiting Washington, D.C.—that the “food shortage crisis” impacting Palestinians in Gaza was “intolerable.”
At the end of that month, Janti Soeripto, president and chief executive of Save the Children US, declared that famine and starvation in Gaza were already happening.
In May, Director of the World Food Program Cindy McCain said that parts of Gaza were experiencing a “full-blown famine” that was rapidly spreading throughout the territory.
Also last month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the grounds that Israel was “causing starvation as a method of war including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.”
The world has brushed aside Israel’s repeated protests that there has been no shortage of food trucks arriving with aid for Gaza and that the problem lay instead with distribution because Hamas was stealing the supplies.
Instead, the liberal international establishment has repeatedly demanded that Israel immediately stop the war, thus inescapably surrendering to Hamas and forfeiting the military leverage required to free the remaining hostages.
Yet now, the famine claims have been debunked.
The Famine Review Committee (FRC) conducts investigations into world hunger on behalf of a partnership formed between governments, international organizations and NGOs.
In March, the committee reported that “famine is now projected and imminent” in northern Gaza and was expected to take hold before the end of May. Preventing such a famine, it stated, required “an immediate political decision for a ceasefire together with a significant and immediate increase in humanitarian and commercial access to the entire population of Gaza.”
In April, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a food security monitoring initiative founded in 1985 by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) went even further by stating there was “reasonable evidence” that, since April, northern Gaza had been experiencing a famine and this would persist at least until the end of July.
But on June 4, the Famine Review Committee published a report in which it rejected the FEWS NET analysis as not “plausible” and said it could not endorse its famine projection.
The committee said there was a lack of reliable evidence about the number of trucks entering Gaza and the level of humanitarian assistance that was arriving and being distributed around its various areas.
In order to compensate for these gaps in the data, it said, FEWS NET had relied on “multiple layers of assumptions and inference” about food availability and access as well as nutritional status and mortality, and had made “deliberate choices over assumptions, without the necessary supporting evidence.”
Such assumptions, said the committee, had ignored or underestimated the value of both commercial sources of food and certain forms of humanitarian aid.
Although this didn’t alter the fact that Gaza was experiencing “extreme human suffering” and that urgent measures were needed to boost humanitarian supplies, the committee concluded that flows of aid and the availability of food had increased significantly in March and April and “that nearly 100 percent of daily kilocalorie requirements were available for the estimated population of 300,000 people in April, even using conservative calculations.”
In other words, the committee reversed its own dire predictions and damned the famine early warning network for excluding evidence that gave the lie to its anti-Israel narrative. The categorical declarations of imminent famine being caused by wicked, heartless, war-criminal Israel just weren’t true.
It’s worth remembering that USAID, the parent body of FEWS NET, is run by Samantha Power, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration.
In 2002, Power suggested in a “thought experiment” that America might have to invade Israel to prevent an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian Arabs. She also suggested that the only people who might be alienated by this would be American Jews, who she said exercised tremendous political and financial power over America.
Other research has also exploded the “Gaza famine” claims. At Columbia University, two professors have said the evidence shows that sufficient amounts of food are being supplied to Gaza.
They toldTheJerusalem Post that it was “a myth that Israel is responsible for famine in Gaza” and suggested that the International Criminal Court and U.N. had joined Hamas in blaming Israel for a “famine that never was, hoping to stop the war.”
Yet there are no signs that these rebuttals of the “Gaza famine” claim are having any effect on the Israel-bashing crowd. A few days ago, The New York Timeswas still referring to “starving civilians” and blaming deaths from malnutrition on “restrictions on aid and commercial goods entering Gaza.”
BBC News reported this week that “warnings of famine are looming once again in northern Gaza,” broadcasting distressing footage of infants said to be suffering from dehydration and malnutrition caused by restrictions on aid at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings.
Other than Fox News, it seems that no mainstream media outlet has reported the Famine Review Committee’s findings that the claim of famine in Gaza cannot be justified. Nor have the anti-Israel humanitarian organizations, although the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has now subtly adjusted his rhetoric by talking about “famine-like conditions.”
Famine is not the only anti-Israel falsehood whose debunking has been ignored. The mainstream media and humanitarian crowd are still using the Hamas figure of 37,000-plus civilians killed in Gaza, despite the fact that the U.N. itself revised its own casualty totals sharply downwards after it emerged that some of the claimed deaths had been drawn from media sources and were fabricated.
Some outlets such as The New York Times, the Australian Broadcasting Corporationand Time magazine are still claiming that the International Court of Justice said the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza faced a “plausible risk of genocide” even though the court said no such thing. As the ICJ President Joan Donoghue herself said, the court decided “that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. … It didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
While Israel continues to be defamed by blood libels about famine and its war of self-defense in Gaza, some five million are facing actual famine in Sudan where up to 150,000 have been killed and up to 10 million displaced. Some 25 million are estimated to need humanitarian assistance as a result of a 14-month-long civil war.
Yet this vast and catastrophic scale of human suffering is being almost totally ignored. On Fox News, Hadeel Oueis, editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab media outlet Jusoor, said: “Sudanese [people] are asking why the world turns a blind eye as the third-largest country in Africa is laid to waste while at the same time fixating on the smaller conflict in Gaza.”
Good question. The answer is as obvious as it is brutal: The world only cares about suffering humanity when it can blame the Jews. That malevolent prism shapes a fixed and murderous narrative about Israel and the Jewish people that no actual facts can be allowed to disturb.
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“Famine is imminent as 1.1 million people, half of Gaza, experience catastrophic food insecurity,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) claimed in a special brief published on March 18.
Following its release, major news organizations jumped at the opportunity to include the word “famine” in their headlines.
However, a new report released on June 4 by the IPC’s Famine Review Committee (FRC) uncovered several flaws in the original data published in March, leading them to amend their original claims. Ultimately, the FRC concluded that they cannot consider the situation in Gaza a “famine.”
Here are the most significant points that deserve to be highlighted:
- The original report said that the caloric availability in the area covered only “59-63% of the needs (based uniquely on Humanitarian Food Assistance) in April.”
- The new report estimates the range of coverage of caloric availability was actually 75-109%.
So how did the IPC go from claiming that Gazans in the north were nowhere near getting their nutritional requirements to acknowledging that they were nowhere near being underfed? How did they get it so wrong the first time?
- When discussing food trucks and other methods of aid entering the area, the IPC excluded commercial and/or privately contracted deliveries and World Food Program (WFP) deliveries to bakeries in northern Gaza from their original numbers.
- The original report “relied on multiple layers of assumptions and inference, beginning with food availability and access in northern Gaza and continuing through nutritional status and mortality.”
- There may have been a “mismatch in reporting periods” by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET).
While the corrected data from the FRC is receiving publicity on various X (formerly Twitter) threads, major news organizations seem to be ignoring its release.
By failing to report on the most recent information, news organizations are misleading their audience about the extent of food flowing into Gaza and misrepresenting the hunger situation in the area.
Even more dangerously, on June 16, almost two weeks after the new data was released, The New York Times still referenced the outdated, invalidated claims.
Why hasn’t The New York Times consulted the new data and instead continues to link false information in its articles?
The new report from the FRC states that it is impossible to determine the number of people who are completely unable to access food in Gaza, and it is inaccurate to continue to say that Gaza is under threat of “imminent famine.”
This is not to suggest that there are not serious problems distributing food in a war zone. But 32 deaths attributed to malnutrition do not exceed the threshold necessary to be considered a “famine,” and most of those suffered from pre-existing conditions.
Instead, the updated data has barely elicited a ripple from the mainstream media, with only Fox News giving the story the attention it deserves. Like many others, The New York Times’ choice to ignore new data contributes to a media environment that villainizes Israel, and contributes to the accusations in places such as the International Court of Justice that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians.
Instead of misleading their audiences by endorsing false claims that there is an insufficient amount of food entering the area, news outlets should better focus their reporting on the collective responsibility of multiple parties in making sure the food is distributed to civilians in need.
One can only hope that as new data emerges, reporting from major news organizations will uphold their journalistic integrity and update their audiences following suit.
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