It should be noted at the outset that the people of Gaza are suffering. They usually don’t have enough to eat, kids are going hungry, and the supply chain that brings food and necessities is non-existent. The fact that the situation doesn’t meet the bureaucratic definition of “starvation” is immaterial when your child is looking at you with hunger in his eyes.
However, that “bureaucratic definition” is a trigger that sets in motion the international aid machine, among other things. It may surprise you to find out that the international organization responsible for triggering this aid — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC) — has never once declared that a famine exists in Gaza, even though the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, declared to Congress in April 2024 that “famine had begun” in Northern Gaza.
The IPC has specific criteria for declaring that a region is suffering from famine. “Today, a famine is declared only when the IPC’s data about a region shows that at least 20 percent of households have run out of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and two people out of every 10,000 are dying each day from starvation,” reports Michael Ames of The Free Press.
Even for the Biden administration, Power’s testimony was shockingly untrue. The IPC report she cited was about possible outcomes in Gaza if the food situation didn’t improve, not actual conditions on the ground. Even more incredibly, USAID issued its own report alleging that famine was underway in Gaza. The international organization that confirms the IPC’s determination about famine is the Famine Review Committee (FRC). The FRC heavily criticized the USAID report, saying its conclusions were unsupportable.
Related: Foreign Aid Official Resisted DOGE Having a Look at His Foundation’s Books. Now We Know Why.
How did USAID get it so wrong (besides its eagerness to accuse Israel of war crimes)?
Private sector food deliveries, such as trucks contracted to commercial warehouses, were left out of the agency’s estimates of the total food supply in north Gaza. As a result, as much as 82 percent of the “daily kilocalorie requirement” in northern Gaza last April wasn’t counted. In the same month, USAID’s famine monitor also left out 940 metric tons (2 million pounds) of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast donated by the UN to bakeries in north Gaza, enough to make about 1,400 metric tons (3 million pounds) of bread.
USAID left out the contributions of bakeries because the bread was sold rather than given away for free.
“North Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed,” writes Ames. Why wasn’t this news?
It wasn’t news because UN officials shrugged off any information that didn’t jibe with their anti-Israel narrative, that Israel was committing genocide by deliberately bombing civilians and starving the residents of Gaza into submission. Many news organizations also suppressed the news that there may have been hunger in Gaza, but no famine.
There were many hints that the headlines about famine in Gaza last year weren’t quite right. 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. One Gaza City restaurant showed off its racks of stuffed rotisserie chickens about two weeks after Power’s testimony.
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.
The FRC released a follow-up report last June, stating that “available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring” in Gaza.
Nicholas Haan, who designed the food-insecurity classification system that became the IPC, explains why he developed the technical definition of famine. He told FRP’s Ames that he wanted to take politics out of the word.
Famine—like genocide, fascist, and dictator—is a word susceptible to rhetorical abuse that can dilute and even invert its meaning. “My goal was to take famine from being a rhetorical word and make it a technical term,” Haan told me. When the IPC uses the word famine now, “we mean famine.”
The news media are not going to issue a correction or a clarification. The charge that Israel is deliberately starving Gazans and causing a famine will stick because of laziness, or bias, or antisemitism.
But anyone who cares to examine the record will know. Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.
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