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Gaza and the truth famine

By: Tom Lennie, July 9, 2024

MILLIONS of Americans were horrified to watch their President appear on live TV with Donald Trump recently, as he fluffed his way through the debate, speaking incomprehensibly; repeatedly mumbling, slurring and forgetting his words.

But why the national, indeed global, sense of shock? Did no one know of Joe Biden’s increasing mental failings? There have been literally dozens of public appearances over the past year or two, all captured on video, of the President showing similarly disturbing signs of serious cognitive failure, including several since his debate disaster.

Yet the vast majority of these embarrassing blunders have not been shown on mainstream media. Any evidence of memory loss, dementia or other cognitive decline has been covered up or flatly denied, while both media outlets and Democrat politicians regularly pushed the line – some still continue – that Biden is ‘sharp as a tack’, ‘on top of his game’, and ‘on the ball’ (e.g., watch this disturbing video clip). As the Telegraph put it, ‘liberal-leaning journalists have provided cover for years – hitting Trump, praising Biden and downplaying the president’s physical decline’, until ‘at the June 27 debate, the evidence became irrefutable’.

Media bias, cover-ups and misinformation, of course, are not new to us. We’ve witnessed similar scenarios on our own shores in the past few weeks with the treatment of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party.

An even bigger story of media misinformation in recent weeks has been the allegation – widely accepted as fact – that Israel has been deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This story was promulgated by the United Nations and has been repeated ad nauseam across global mainstream media for weeks on end.

On June 25, the Guardian was telling its readers that ‘for many months now, it has been no secret that one of America’s closest allies has been using hunger as a weapon against a civilian population’. Last week the BBC ran the headline that a ‘High risk of famine in Gaza persists’.

While hardly gaining widespread coverage, a report released on June 4 by the UN-linked IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) uncovered several flaws in the original data published in March, leading them to amend their original claims. Ultimately, the IPC concluded that they cannot consider the situation in Gaza to be a ‘famine.’

Indeed, what may come as a complete surprise is that according to the United Nations only 3 per cent of the residents of Rafah were poorly fed in May. In Khan Yunis and the central town of Deir al Balah, that figure stood at 6 per cent. The biggest challenges were faced by those who had failed to evacuate from the north at the start of the campaign; there, 13 per cent were found to be hungry. Overall, the overwhelming majority of Gazans had‘acceptable’ quantities of food.

In particular, in discussing food trucks and other methods of aid entering the area, the IPC had, for whatever reason, neglected to include in their original calculations commercial and/or privately contracted deliveries and World Food Program deliveries to bakeries in northern Gaza.

Before the conflict, in 2022, despite billions of dollars of aid money being poured into the Gaza Strip, 14 per cent of the population faced hunger. The reality would appear to be that they are better provisioned now than when Hamas was in charge.

There has been no apology from the media for their mammoth misinformation campaign. Instead, the new line, spun by the UN and amplified by the BBC and others, is that Gazans face ‘catastrophic levels’ of hunger.

A Gazan resident recently told the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons: ‘Food is available, everything is available . . . Meat, chicken, vegetables. It is not aid. It is coming from Israel, brought in by private people through the Keren Shalom crossing and sold to us as a business. The prices are much better, just a little bit higher than before the war.’

This was a relief, he added, as for seven months Hamas had been stealing humanitarian aid and selling it to the population at exorbitant rates. Now, he said, goods are being bought and sold as normal.

Even the Palestinian Authority’s own TV reporter in the Gaza Strip said that central Gaza is ‘overflowing’ with products and that what prevents the PA’s public employees from buying food and other necessities is the fact that they ‘can’t take their money from the banks because Hamas is acting as if the ATMs are their private property and no one else can make withdrawals’.

In evidence presented to the Jerusalem Post in early June, two Columbia University professors, Awi Federgruen and Ran Kivetz, analysed available data. Their findings demonstrate that ‘sufficient amounts of food are being supplied into Gaza’ and that it is ‘a myth that Israel is responsible for famine’ in the Strip.

This ‘myth’ has had enormous consequences, for it resulted in the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants (since postponed) for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister on the grounds that Israel is ‘causing starvation as a method of war including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict’.

The Columbia research demonstrates that ‘250 truckloads’ is sufficient ‘to feed the entire Gazan population, in accordance with a normal diet in North America’. They note that Israel regularly halts offensives for four hours a day to facilitate these deliveries. However, food is not consistently distributed once it reaches Gaza, and is often sabotaged and stolen by Hamas.

Shockingly, weeks after this revealing data was released, some media outlets are still referencing outdated, invalidated claims and referring to ‘famine’ in Gaza. There have been longstanding claims that major media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN (in America) and, especially the BBC (see here, here, here and here), have been engaged in seriously biased reporting on the Israel/Hamas war.
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