By Harry Storm
Israel is regularly accused of causing starvation and famine in Gaza. Accusers say Israel withholds food purposely, as part of a genocidal strategy that especially targets women and children. Yet recent malnutrition and related statistics reveal that Gaza’s acute malnutrition and child stunting rates are actually far lower than those of other countries in the region.
UNICEF, which previously had joined the pack in accusing Israel of deliberately starving Palestinians, now admits that “wasting [i.e. extreme thinness[ is low across all domains, suggesting no widespread acute malnutrition at population level.”
In fact, Gaza’s acute malnutrition rate of 0.5% is one of the lowest in the middle east and north Africa.
Acute malnutrition often causes stunted growth among children, which is a major global health concern, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, due to its persistently high prevalence. Stunting is typically caused by chronic maternal and child malnutrition during the critical first 1000 days of life.
Many middle eastern countries have extremely high child stunting rates: for example, stunting rates in Libya , Yemen, and Sudan are all above 30%, and Syria rates range from 25.4% to 33% in northwestern areas. Interestingly, all the countries mentioned above experiencing civil war of some kind, and combatants in Yemen and Sudan have been accused of genocide, though much of the world appears uninterested in those conflicts. As for neighboring Egypt, its child stunting rate is around 23%.
But what are stunting rates in the only conflict most of the world cares about? In the West Bank and Gaza as a whole, the rate is 8.7%. In Gaza, the rate is 12%, which is about half of the rate for the region as a whole.
Given the frequent and hyped accusations that Israel was starving the Palestinians and that famine was imminent, you’d expect stunting rates among Palestinian children to be much higher. The reason why the rates in Gaza were lower is obvious: there was never widespread starvation in Gaza, even during the height of the war.
These findings ought to dispel the myth of famine in Gaza. Unfortunately, like the so-called “genocide,” famine in Gaza is an idea that has firmly taken root among the millions of uninformed pro-Palestinians worldwide, most of whom are unlikely to be convinced by real evidence.
Instead, they’re swayed by photos of emaciated children – later revealed to be suffering from diseases that cause wasting — despite the presence of well-fed parents and relatives in the photographs. The fact that no group photo of starving Gazans has ever been produced doesn’t seem to matter either.
After all, if Israel can be widely considered a genocidal nation after issuing warnings to residents in various ways, evacuating people from danger zones, facilitating a polio vaccination campaign that inoculated over a million Palestinian children in Gaza and taking tens of thousands more to Israeli hospitals, starvation is just another entry on the list of calumnies levelled against the Jewish state.
Israel is accused of snatching body parts from dead people. Its detractors claim it controls U.S. foreign policy, and the goal is to create a greater Israel that would include parts of Egypt Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (because adding tens of millions of Muslim Arabs living in those countries is just what Israel needs).
Pro-Palestinians now regularly exhorts Israelis to “go back to Poland,”despite the fact that more than half of Israeli Jews hail from the middle east or north Africa. Israelis are routinely told they are behaving like Nazis – the people who exterminated most of the Jews of Europe — and Jews and others who don’t agree are supposedly “complicit in genocide.”
And since 2021, the UN General Assembly has passed twice as many resolutions against Israel than against the rest of the world COMBINED. Think about that for a moment. Resolutions against China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and all the other human rights abusers in the world today added together still make up fewer than half of those directed at a tiny country of 10 million.
And millions of supposedly educated people think all this is normal.
