For several months, a grave accusation has circulated with mechanical regularity: Israel is allegedly starving Gaza’s civilian population.
This claim—repeated endlessly by Western media, uncritically relayed by NGOs such as Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, and Save the Children, and amplified by UN agencies—suggests that the Jewish state is guilty of engineering mass famine, even committing a form of “genocide by hunger.” Yet a close examination of the facts, data, sources, and mechanics behind this rhetoric reveals not only distortions, but also a deliberate strategy of disinformation in which certain organizations meant to defend humanitarian law act as ideological echo chambers.
Leading this critique is British legal expert Natasha Hausdorff, a member of UK Lawyers for Israel and a specialist in international law. Hausdorff systematically dismantles this narrative, exposing how the international humanitarian discourse has been manipulated to manufacture a fictional reality.
True famine does not go unnoticed. Genuine famine - as seen in Ethiopia in the 1980s or more recently in Yemen - brings a rapid spike in deaths from severe malnutrition, gaunt children in vast numbers, overwhelmed hospitals, empty food stores, and harrowing scenes impossible for even the most hardened journalists to ignore. In Gaza, despite repeated alarm bells since autumn 2023, no credible reporting has shown such conditions. No independent physicians report an influx of child corpses due to starvation. No neutral organization has produced a verified, serious investigation documenting famine. What we see instead is a flood of reports based on speculation, extrapolations, or anonymous “aid workers on the ground.” The gap between narrative and reality is striking.
Hausdorff points out that this system operates by reversing the burden of proof. It is no longer the accusers who must prove famine exists, but Israel who must prove it does not. This reversal turns stories into facts and impressions into realities. Worse, it relies on statistics produced or endorsed by Hamas itself, or by agencies working with it. Hamas’s Ministry of Health, which controls all information in Gaza, issues daily updates accepted without question by the UN, and then echoed by the press. It is a closed circuit where unverifiable data become official truths. The FAO and UNICEF statement in March 2024, citing the hunger-related deaths of children in northern Gaza, is a case in point: no names, no locations, no confirmed medical causes. When asked for specifics, these agencies retreat behind the excuse of “lack of humanitarian access” - a phrase that allows them to assert without ever having to prove.
Importantly, this access problem is not due to Israeli policy. Each day, hundreds of aid trucks are authorized to enter Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings. Israel coordinates with the U.S., Egypt, the UAE, and other actors to deliver food, fuel, medicine, potable water, and infant formula. What NGOs fail to mention is that this aid is frequently hijacked, hoarded, or sold on the black market by Hamas. Several Arab journalists, including from Muslim countries, have documented this underground trade in bread, rice, and sugar - run by Hamas operatives. Fully stocked warehouses have been found mere hundreds of meters from supposedly starving neighborhoods. Hausdorff underscores that Hamas has a vested interest in maintaining visible suffering: it functions as political and media leverage against Israel. Thus, the people of Gaza are effectively held hostage by those claiming to represent them. The real strategy of famine is wielded by Hamas against its own population, deliberately engineering shortages for political gain.
Even in periods when Israel has temporarily suspended or reduced aid flow-typically due to attacks on its convoys or infrastructure - these suspensions have not caused any genuine supply breakdown. Why? Because months of prior aid deliveries had built up substantial reserves: food, flour, non-perishable goods, medical supplies. U.S. and other sources have confirmed that these stockpiles, stored by Hamas in secure warehouses, were not distributed to civilians but rationed out through Hamas-controlled markets. The existence of these reserves disproves the famine claim: the issue is not scarcity, but criminal mismanagement by a terrorist organization exploiting hunger to cement control.
A Medieval Fantasy in Modern Garb
This is not mere logistical failure or opportunism; it is ideological. The accusations against Israel revive a longstanding anti-Semitic archetype: the Jew as the cruel oppressor, accused of feeding off the suffering of innocents. In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of ritual child murder and of using Christian blood in matzah. Today, these tropes return in modern form—not blood in bread, but starving Palestinian babies, allegedly denied milk by Israel.
In this symbolic system, even when Jews are under attack, they remain the designated oppressors. NGOs, purporting neutrality, often serve this narrative. Amnesty International has shown a consistent bias against Israel, remaining silent on Hamas’s crimes and reluctant to name Islamist terrorism. The UNRWA has employed Hamas collaborators and uses schoolbooks that deny Israel’s existence and glorify armed resistance. Their selective outrage - quick to decry a fictional famine, silent on Israeli hostages or Hamas’s internal repression - reveals the ideological nature of this system.
Within today’s human rights framework, Israel - being the only Jewish state - is cast as the default perpetrator, and the Palestinians, perceived as the eternally oppressed, are granted a moral blank check. The “Gaza famine” narrative serves this ideological inversion, allowing modern institutions to re-stage an ancient accusatory drama where the persecuted become the new tormentors. This idea transcends politics; it has infected the very language of humanitarianism.
The famine accusation increasingly comes packaged with another: genocide. But here again, reality is flipped. The only genocide attempt in this war occurred on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a systematic slaughter of civilians, including mass rapes, immolations, stabbings, and the murder of children. These crimes fall squarely under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Yet in a moral inversion of staggering scale, it is Israel - the nation attacked - that stands accused of extermination.
This weaponization of “genocide” does not rest solely on distorted intentions; it relies on the deliberate fabrication of suffering. By creating food shortages, hoarding supplies, obstructing deliveries, and attacking aid convoys, Hamas executes a famine strategy against its own people to fuel its accusatory narrative. Its goal is not to save lives in Gaza, but to sacrifice enough of them to construct a global story of Israeli genocide. The real atrocity is not committed by Israel against Gazans, but by Hamas using Gazans to indict Israel in the court of international opinion.
To call out this lie is not to deny the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. On the contrary, it honors them by rejecting the exploitation of their misery for ideological purposes. Compassion must not cloud judgment. By embracing unverified stories, many journalists, diplomats, and aid officials become agents in an information war aimed less at alleviating suffering than at assigning blame. In this war, Israel is forced to answer not for its actions, but for what is merely said about its actions.
Figures like Natasha Hausdorff deserve credit for challenging this façade. By demanding evidence, defending legal standards, and exposing manipulations of language, she brings rationality back into a debate drowned in emotion. Accusing Israel of orchestrating famine without proof turns accusation itself into a weapon of war - one not fought only on battlefields, but in minds, forums, and headlines. In this conflict, words can destroy legitimacy more effectively than weapons.
Trump vs. Netanyahu – A Curious Rift on Famine, and the Unspoken Asymmetries of War
In a remarkable turn of events, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly contradicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated denials that famine exists in Gaza. While Netanyahu has consistently maintained that Israel is not responsible for starvation - calling such claims “bold-faced lies” and blaming Hamas for aid diversion - Trump took a sharply different position during a very recent press conference.
Standing alongside UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer - a leader not known for strong pro-Israel sympathies - Trump stated: “Those children look very hungry… It’s real starvation stuff; you can’t fake that.” He announced his intention to establish U.S.-funded food centers in Gaza and demanded that Israel “make sure they get the food,” implying direct Israeli responsibility for alleviating the humanitarian crisis.
What makes this moment particularly striking is not only Trump’s contradiction of Netanyahu, but the context in which he did it. Speaking as a guest of Keir Starmer, Trump had an ideal stage to reaffirm Israel’s narrative, counter growing anti-Israel rhetoric in Europe, and challenge the weaponization of humanitarian imagery. Instead, he reinforced the very narrative Israel has struggled to disprove. It was a missed diplomatic opportunity, especially for someone who once prided himself on being Israel’s most outspoken defender on the world stage.
This statement is striking not only for its content, but for its source. Trump’s entire judgment appears based solely on images he’s seen in the media - the same media he routinely derides as “fake news” and untrustworthy. That someone so publicly skeptical of mainstream narratives would now reverse course based on unverified visual impressions suggests the extraordinary emotive power such imagery wields - even over those most resistant to it.
But beyond the Trump–Netanyahu divide lies a deeper absurdity in the expectations placed on Israel. In what other war in modern history has a nation at war been expected - and morally required - to feed the very entity committed to its destruction? Israel is not fighting a state with whom it shares diplomatic obligations. It is engaged in an existential conflict with a terrorist organization, Hamas, whose charter calls for its annihilation. And yet, despite this, Israel not only allows humanitarian aid to enter enemy territory but is castigated internationally when that aid is blocked, intercepted, or delayed - often due to direct attacks on its own convoys.
Historically, no country has been expected to feed its enemy during an active war. The idea would have been unthinkable in World War II: the Allies did not airlift food to Nazi Germany while under fire; the Soviets did not supply the Wehrmacht with fuel or wheat during the siege of Stalingrad. Yet Israel, uniquely, is judged not by the standards of history, but by a moral exceptionalism imposed upon it - often by those who ignore or downplay Hamas’s deliberate weaponization of suffering.
In this light, Trump’s statements - even if well-intentioned - reflect a profound misunderstanding of wartime ethics and asymmetry. They serve to reinforce a troubling double standard: Israel is expected to fight a brutal war against terrorists while simultaneously functioning as their humanitarian lifeline.
This contradiction—voiced now even by those once counted among Israel’s staunchest allies—underscores the ideological confusion and selective empathy that characterize the current discourse. The debate around famine in Gaza is no longer just about facts on the ground; it is about optics, political signaling, and the dangerous elevation of perception over reality. That even Donald Trump has been pulled into this narrative - by images alone - is a measure of how distorted the global conversation has become.
Even more staggering is what this aid continues to enable. Hamas still refuses to release Israeli hostages, both living and dead. Families of the abducted endure unthinkable agony, while diplomatic efforts stall. Meanwhile, not a single Gaza resident has stepped forward to assist Israeli forces in locating these hostages, identifying tunnel shafts, or exposing Hamas command structures. Despite Israel risking soldiers’ lives to limit civilian casualties and allow aid into Gaza, there is no reciprocal humanitarian gesture - not even a whispered clue, a signal, a map.
This silence from the local population - whether out of fear, loyalty, or indoctrination - amplifies the asymmetry. Israel is expected to act with the morality of a liberal democracy while fighting an enemy that exploits every moral restraint as a weapon. The moral obligation is unilateral; the empathy, one-directional.
Trump’s comments, even if well-meaning, further entrench this double standard. They ignore the reality that humanitarian suffering in Gaza is not simply a product of siege or scarcity, but a calculated outcome of Hamas’s strategy. And they obscure the unprecedented ethical burden placed upon a state expected to feed, heal, and supply those who would see it erased.
This contradiction - voiced now even by former allies - reflects not a shift in facts, but a shift in optics. It’s no longer about what is true, but about what looks true. And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous famine of all: a famine of clarity, of moral consistency, and of courage to name the real authors of suffering.
Jacques R. Rothschild was born in Belgium and served as a unit commander in the IDF paratroopers. He graduated in Mathematics, Statistics, and International Affairs from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and currently lives with his family in New York City, where he works as an investment banker. He also writes and speaks publicly about current affairs and causes for which he cares deeply.