After talk for year-and-a-half of Gaza "famine," UN agencies won’t confirm one occurred

As Israel blocks entry of certain goods into Gaza to pressure Hamas to free the remaining hostages, some critics of the Jewish state are reviving the narrative that Jerusalem

Cindy McCain, the widow of former senator John McCain and executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, said in May 2024 that northern Gaza had entered “full-blown famine.” Two months prior, Matthew Hollingworth, the U.N. agency’s interim director for the Palestinian territories, proclaimed “famine is a reality” in the Strip.

Some two months before that, Martin Griffiths, then the U.N. emergency relief chief, said that the Israel-Hamas war brought famine to Gaza with “such incredible speed.” He added that the “great majority” of 400,000 Gazans deemed at the time by U.N. agencies to be at risk of starvation “are actually in famine, not just at risk of famine.”

JNS has sought comment repeatedly from U.N. agencies, after the announced January ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, about whether the global body has any evidence that famine occurred in Gaza.

The office of António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Food Programme declined multiple requests for comment on whether they could confirm that there was famine in Gaza.

“Hamas has a documented track record of looting humanitarian aid sent by Israel to Gaza, and using that aid to sustain its terror apparatus,” Jonathan Harounoff, international spokesperson for Israel’s U.N. mission, told JNS.

“The only famine in Gaza relates to the Israeli hostages, who have been—and are being—starved and tortured while in brutal captivity,” Harounoff told JNS.

Allegations of famine, coupled with accusations that Israel employed a policy of deliberate starvation, have had enormous diplomatic, legal and societal repercussions.

Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, listed “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” atop his charges when he filed for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister.

The U.N.-aligned Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analyses, through which the United Nations was attributing claims of famine, were repeatedly called into question, including by the IPC’s own Famine Review Committee. The latter issued a report assailing the IPC’s methodology and noting severe undercounting of food deliveries to Gaza.

The IPC doesn’t produce its own data but instead culls it from partner organizations on the ground, including U.N. agencies. The IPC routinely issued new famine warnings based on that data, which can include retroactively—and quietly—revising its previous projections of famine down to levels reflecting food insecurity that more typical in conflicts.

The chief economist at the World Food Program told JNS in June 2024 that there was a lack of data indicating an ongoing famine, but “whether it is classified as a famine or not is not the point.”

JNS asked Guterres’s office earlier this month what evidence it had of famine in Gaza.

Stéphane Dujarric, Gutteres’s spokesman, told JNS in a March 10 press briefing that “we talked about the very severe risk of famine.”

“Those studies were done by the IPC, which is a group of U.N. agencies and also a group of non-U.N. agencies, American, German, Europeans and others, who’ve established a scientific method to talk about hunger, to classify hunger, and we stand by their findings,” he said.

Irrespective of whether Guterres and the global body as a whole stated that there was famine in Gaza, JNS asked Dujarric how his boss reconciles that stance with the many statements from U.N. officials alleging active famine in Gaza.

“We may have, at the United Nations, the world’s most recognizable logo, but there’s no brand management,” Dujarric told JNS. “There are a lot of people who can speak on, quote-unquote, behalf of the U.N. I’m speaking on behalf of the secretary-general, what we’ve said here, and what others have said.”

Dujarric referred JNS to the offices of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Food Programme. JNS sought comment repeatedly from World Food Programme offices in multiple cities, from the IPC and from OCHA.

“We are aware that people have starved in Gaza,” an OCHA spokeswoman told JNS.

JNS noted that starvation and famine are substantially different classifications of food insecurity, per the IPC scale upon which the United Nations relies, and asked the spokeswoman if OCHA would confirm Griffiths’s assertion of famine.

“I believe there may be an IPC assessment coming out shortly, and we look forward to seeing its findings,” the spokeswoman said.

© JNS