Key Takeaways:
- The Gaza famine narrative remained consistent throughout the war, despite the data being flawed and inconsistent.
- New data from the UN shows extremely low acute malnutrition rates among children.
- The international media has been reluctant to report the new evidence that contradicts the famine claim.
Claims of mass starvation and imminent famine in Gaza began to take form at the beginning of December 2023. Just as quickly as the claims emerged, they shifted, ultimately creating a false label, that once applied against Israel, would be difficult to reverse.
By March 2024, the claim evolved into a warning of “imminent starvation” by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which the international media immediately proliferated. Three months later, when the IPC’s Famine Review Committee (FRC) amended the famine claims and determined they could not consider the situation in Gaza a “famine,” the media was silent.
An “imminent famine” became the media’s go-to narrative in November 2024, marking the front page of nearly every major outlet. This claim remained consistent through July 2025, when an IPC alert warning of famine lowered the threshold of famine. By August 2025, the IPC reported a definitive famine through a report riddled with problematic methodology and authors with anti-Israel biases.
When data from the Global Nutrition Cluster (GNC) in July-August 2025 showed malnutrition rates were 23% lower than those used by the IPC, the media once again was reluctant to report.
The pattern is clear: only reports that demonize Israel are of interest to the international media – even when they are found to have clear factual issues or biases. Anything that contradicts the pre-determined conclusions is ignored altogether.
So when UNICEF data emerged at the end of July 2026 indicating that with a rate of 0.5% Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, the international legacy media was absent. This is despite these numbers being smaller than the rate of 0.8% recorded before the Israel-Hamas war.
The Free Press’ analysis of World Bank and IPC data concluded that 12% of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development, as a result of poor nutrition. In comparison, 26% of children in the rest of the region had suffered from these conditions, according to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. UNICEF has also recently revealed that 4% of children under the age of 5 in Gaza are now experiencing challenges related to obesity and excessive weight.
By the IPC’s own standards, there needs to be two deaths related to starvation per 10,000 people every day for a famine to be declared, meaning that had famine existed in Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians would have died this way throughout the war.. But even the Hamas Ministry of Health reported only 461 deaths as a result of malnutrition, further demonstrating that there was no famine.
If there was a famine in Gaza, how could it be that the most vulnerable population is now dealing with the opposite issue, one year later? And how did Gaza become one of the territories in the region with the lowest rates of child malnutrition, if not because of falsified claims of a non-existent famine?
Simply put, a famine doesn’t reverse itself within a matter of a few months – only a falsified one can.
For nearly three years, the media has reported without fail that Gaza is in a starvation crisis, on the brink of famine, or has entered the conditions of famine. And for the same three years, the data has been telling the exact opposite story.
The evidence remains that famine was never in Gaza. It was only in the headlines.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
