One might have thought that in an age of instant communication and supposed journalistic rigour, the truth would have a fighting chance. One would, it turns out, have been wrong.
For months the Western press treated us to one of the most lurid accusations levelled against Israel in the course of its war with Hamas: that the Jewish state was deliberately starving the population of Gaza into submission. The charge was not merely serious; it was apocalyptic. "Mass starvation" was imminent, we were told. Emaciated children stared out from front pages. Israel, the headlines implied, and sometimes stated, was engineering a famine.
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| Hamas commandeering the aid provided by Israel |
The principal exhibit in this campaign was a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed body whose methodology has long been criticized by serious analysts. In August 2025 the IPC announced that more than half a million people in Gaza were already experiencing "famine." The figure was repeated with the solemnity normally reserved for papal encyclicals. Almost nobody in the major media paused to ask whether the underlying data were sound.
Then, as quietly as a scandal is buried, the whole edifice collapsed.
In July and August 2025 the
Global Nutrition Cluster—a consortium that actually includes UN agencies and other aid organizations, released data showing malnutrition rates in Gaza some 23 per cent lower than the IPC had claimed. The highest measured rate was 11.9 per cent, comfortably below the 15 per cent threshold that defines famine. In other words, the most incendiary humanitarian claim of the entire war had been built on sand.
And what did our fearless
fourth estate do with this revelation? Precisely nothing.Not a single major Western outlet saw fit to run a headline admitting that the famine scare had rested on faulty data. The story did not merely fade; it was disappeared. No retraction, no correction, no embarrassed follow-up. The same papers and broadcasters that had treated the IPC report as Holy Writ simply averted their gaze and moved on.
This is not mere journalistic sloppiness. It is something closer to complicity.
The original IPC figures did not linger in academic journals. They were weaponized. They fed UN resolutions, inflamed campuses, provided the soundtrack for riots in Western cities, and placed Jewish communities around the world in heightened danger. Once the slogan "Israel is starving Gaza" had gone viral, inconvenient facts became wholly irrelevant. Israeli officials could protest, independent experts could point out missing data and dodgy methodology, but it was all in vain. The narrative had been set.
We now know a little more about those methodological dodges. The IPC relied on partial datasets, clinic-based screenings unrepresentative of the wider population, and a switch to mid-upper-arm-circumference (
MUAC) measurements known to inflate malnutrition figures. Serious flaws, one might think, flaws grave enough to bring down the whole "famine" edifice. Yet the media that had amplified the alarm with such gusto discovered, when the correction arrived, that they had suddenly lost interest in Gaza's nutritional statistics.
The panic was news; the refutation was not.
This ought to disturb anyone who still believes journalism has a duty to truth rather than to ideology. When an accusation of this magnitude is lobbed into the public square it does not simply evaporate when disproven. It lives on in the slogans daubed on university walls, in the threats issued against synagogues, in the simmering resentment that turns neighbors against neighbors. The outrage gets the megaphone; the correction is whispered, if it is uttered at all.In conflict zones, words are munitions. "Famine," "genocide," "starvation" these are not neutral descriptors; they are political ordnance. When journalists treat them as gospel one week and ignore their demolition the next, they are not merely failing in their craft. They are participating in the very distortions they affect to deplore.
So let the reader draw the necessary conclusion. If the people whose profession is skepticism refuse to practice it, then the skepticism must be supplied by the rest of us. Every lurid humanitarian claim now requires the question that the press no longer asks: who benefits from this story, and what happens if it turns out to be untrue?
In the case of the Gaza famine scare, we know the answer. A nation's reputation was savaged, public discourse was poisoned, and Jewish communities paid a price in fear and loathing, all on the strength of numbers that did not survive a single subsequent inquiry.
And the watchdogs of the press simply looked the other way.
Next time a headline screams catastrophe, remember what happened this time. Treat it with the robust suspicion that the journalists themselves so conspicuously failed to display. Because if they will not do their job, somebody must do it.
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