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The Gaza Famine Myth

(The Free Press) Michael Ames - In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for the Biden administration, became the first senior U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun. She cited a report published by an independent, United Nations-affiliated monitoring system, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC). In 20 years, just four famines have been confirmed by the IPC: Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan in 2024. A confirmed famine in Gaza, as Power told Congress was happening, would have been a historic catastrophe and the first to occur outside continental Africa. Power's statement bolstered claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. But there were serious problems with Power's sensational testimony. Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway. The Famine Review Committee (FRC), which functions as the IPC's final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning. North Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed. These findings should have been big news. But the FRC report's conclusions were ignored or went unnoticed by news organizations -- and other UN officials made it sound like nothing had changed. Journalists can peruse a social media archive of life in Gaza compiled by Jacqui Peleg, an Israeli-British citizen who speaks Arabic and has been scraping YouTube, Telegram, TikTok, and other sites since 2018. Posting on X under the name Imshin, Peleg has gained nearly 80,000 followers who are curious about the conflict's complexities and skeptical of media narratives. On social media in March 2024, one food importer showcased a tractor trailer full of frozen chicken, and a chef in Rafah advertised his plates of chicken and rice. Nicholas Haan, a volunteer on the FRC, was one of the authors of the report that rebuked the USAID analysis. "Famine - like genocide, fascist, and dictator -- is a word susceptible to rhetorical abuse that can dilute and even invert its meaning," Haan said.
2025-05-08 00:00:00
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