Earlier this week, the BBC reported that “14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours” if aid didn’t reach their communities. The story spread around the world like wildfire. A quick Google search tells me that major media outlets across Europe, Australia, and the United States breathlessly reported it. Politicians were even using the story to back their political agendas.
Here’s ABC making it a top “breaking news” story on “World News Tonight.”
As Israel expands its assault in Gaza, the United Nations has warned that 14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours if aid doesn’t reach them now. @IanPannell reports on the growing international condemnation and rapidly growing humanitarian crisis. https://t.co/edzCIhQ3Ln pic.twitter.com/glsuMs9XLp
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) May 21, 2025
The problem? It wasn’t exactly true.
The information came from United Nations emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher, who issued a dire warning on the BBC’s “Radio 4 Today” program. “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” he said, later adding, “I want to save as many of these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.”
48 hours.
The interviewer asked Fletcher how he’d arrived at that number, to which he responded, “We still have lots of people on the ground. And so they’re at the medical centers, they’re at the schools. We had another school bombed yesterday, trying to assess needs, and this is why our mechanism for getting aid in, it’s imperfect.”
The Israeli government didn’t like the interview too much. It called it “propaganda,” “blood libel,” and “fabrications.”
Genocide? War crimes? These aren’t facts – 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚’𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒂𝒃𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔.@UNOCHA head Fletcher’s accusations collapse under scrutiny, just like every one of his past claims.
He’s not after justice. He’s after headlines and money. pic.twitter.com/qoIymON0hy
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) May 21, 2025
When Tom Fletcher @UNReliefChief, Head of @UNOCHA, ignores Hamas’ atrocities but echoes their propaganda – it’s not humanitarian work, it’s blood libel. pic.twitter.com/BkA2OGoiOG
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) May 21, 2025
So did Fletcher just make this information up? Sort of. The BBC eventually reached out to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which clarified that the “remarks were based on a report that warned that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition were expected to occur between April 2025 and March 2026 among children aged between six months and five years.” The report was created by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Nowhere in the analysis does it suggest that any of these children will die at any point in time.
While it’s still a sad situation, it’s also quite a different story from the extremely urgent and entirely false one Fletcher peddled on the air. The BBC later corrected the story, but it was pretty much too little too late.
The BBC apologized. Of course they lied. pic.twitter.com/eUYSmmx579
— Katherine Rosenthal 🇮🇱🎗️ (@10pillar) May 21, 2025
It’s awful to think of any child suffering from malnutrition or going without food. But this kind of fake reporting, in my opinion, can be just as detrimental to the world’s population as starvation. I mean, it seems to me that this is the kind of language and misinformation that could lead to a young Jewish couple being murdered on the street in Washington, D.C.
And while I have no doubt that there are people in Gaza who are starving, why are we blaming Israel and its allies?
Something else these fake news outlets fail to report is that even though Israel began offering aid to Gazans again this week after stopping in March, much of that aid doesn’t actually reach these starving “babies.” It’s stolen by Hamas and often sold back to people in an effort to continue funding the war.
From an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
Israel facilitated the entry of 25,000 aid trucks during the cease-fire ending March 18. It was confident that Gaza had supplies for five to seven months, but after Hamas pilfered aid, shortages have already become imminent, only three months on.
What was the world to do—pressure Hamas to fork over what it has stolen or pressure Israel to let in more for Hamas to steal? The answer has always been the latter, even though it prolongs the war. Everyone knows Hamas would gladly let Gazans starve to score a win over Israel. President Trump doesn’t want that any more than President Biden did.
Mr. Biden promised on Oct. 18, 2023, that aid would stop if Hamas stole it, but he never kept his word. Mr. Trump backed the aid blockage in March but lately made clear that time is up.
The op-ed states that “Canada, the U.K. and France threatened Israel on Monday with ‘concrete actions,'” something Hamas officially thanked them for.
It also points out that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S. organization, is seeking to combat this issue by opening “distribution centers in areas of Gaza with IDF perimeter control rather than send trucks all across vulnerable territory,” adding that “Private U.S. security contractors will handle the distribution from border crossings to Secure Distribution Sites, and a GHF spokesman says civilian teams will then distribute the aid directly to Gazans.”
According to the Journal, the U.N. is against this distribution plan because it makes them and a “complex of human-rights and aid groups” irrelevant. Kind of sounds like the reason why the Trump administration went after USAID.
Once again, I’m reminded that the left either doesn’t understand the way the world works, or they have some corrupt ulterior motives. Maybe a little of both. I watched many, many hours of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s congressional hearings this week, and a lot of those representatives and senators blamed the U.S. and Israel for the fact that “kids” were starving in Gaza. No one ever thought to blame Hamas. It’s beyond time for these people to put their agendas aside and start going after the bad guys for doing awful things.
I wonder how long it will take for all of the fake news outlets, like ABC, to correct their stories? Those “starving babies” might die from old age before it happens. That’s why I felt it was important to make sure our readers knew the real story.
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