The mass famine in Gaza was a major media story

When people want to be deceived, they are prepared to believe anything. A solemn assertion, repeated until it hardens the collective conscience, and then the UN’s own figures, which once again speak in a less dramatic tone.

A UNICEF-led team measuring hunger in Gaza has uploaded a presentation containing its most comprehensive analysis since the war broke out nearly three years ago. The report, entitled “Gaza Nutrition Smart Survey Result”, revealed a sharp reversal from statements made exactly one year ago, which claimed that a terrible famine was ravaging the Hamas-controlled territory.

“There is no widespread acute malnutrition at population level,” the text reads. With a rate of 0.5 per cent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, lower even than Egypt and Jordan, according to a Free Press analysis based on data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-affiliated hunger monitoring system.

The presentation by the UNICEF-led team also revealed that Gaza is now facing a new challenge: overweight, which affects a total of four per cent of children under the age of five. A researcher who supervised teams collecting data on malnutrition in the Horn of Africa noted that she had ‘never seen’ the emergence of obesity and being overweight in a place that, just one year earlier, had been formally declared to be in a state of famine.

“In Africa, we have people who eat wild herbs just to stay alive,” he said. The UNICEF report also noted that “very few confirmed nutrition-related deaths have been reported in Gaza”. The State Department stated that “the latest findings from UNICEF provide yet another example that completely debunks the countless false accusations against Israel of deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. There are UN agencies, media organisations and NGOs that should retract and correct their politicised and unfounded attacks against Israel, which has delivered over two million tonnes of food to Gaza since the ceasefire came into effect.”

In 2023, the UN warned of mass starvation. In 2024, famine was ‘imminent’. On 22 August 2025, the IPC officially declared a famine in parts of Gaza. Over half a million Palestinians were “facing catastrophic conditions characterised by hunger, destitution and death”, the IPC stated. Last year’s famine declaration by the IPC was only the fifth ever and the first outside Africa. It sparked a wave of anger against Israel and the Jewish people, which had been building up for over a year, with accusations that Israel was using hunger as a weapon of war.

Suddenly, Israeli Jews were starving the Palestinians. And 2025 was the deadliest year for anti-Semitic attacks worldwide since 1945. Now, new UN data shows acute malnutrition across Gaza at 0.2–0.8 per cent, lower than in neighbouring Arab countries. How is it possible that Gaza has gone from being officially classified as facing famine to having – in less than a year – one of the lowest levels of child malnutrition in the region? This is not to say that no one in Gaza has gone hungry, nor does it downplay the suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza or their health concerns.

But the clear reversal documented by the UN calls for an examination to understand why that narrative required so much media coverage and so little empirical rigour. If today’s figures contradict the grand narrative, what hunger has gone unwitnessed? That of the Israeli hostages in the tunnels – undernourished, buried in darkness, forced to dig their own graves in silence. Hunger without cameras does not lead to resolutions. It leads only to oblivion.