By Jeremiah Love —
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch warned that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, based on United Nations data and an “analysis of aid blockades.” Media coverage reached a crescendo in August 2025.
But many of the “analyses” were flawed and media portraits deceptive, including pictures of Gazans said to be starved but instead suffering from congenital disorders that reduced them to skin and bones.
A September report Began-Sedat Center for Strategic Studies dismisses the miscalculations of researchers and agencies that cried foul when no foul was committed. At the same time, the report condemned “the Israeli government’s decision in March 2025 to halt aid supplies to Gaza.”
“It was wrong to to block traditional distribution methods before viable alternatives were established,” said the report written by Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin and Johnathan Braverman in conjunction with Bar-Ilan University.
Aside from that one condemnation, the report says that U.N. came to conclusions based on faulty data.
Firstly, prior to March 2 of this year, reports of famine were based primarily on trucks. The U.N. said that 500 trucks every day were needed to bring in enough food to feed the 2.1M inhabitants.
“This claim is patently false,” the report says. “The fallacy formed the basis for inaccurate calculations… which have been widely disseminated in media reports and public discourse… Based on our analysis of available data, a maximum of 82 trucks were needed daily during the war to ensure food supply equal to the prewar situation.”
In 2022, only 73 trucks entered the Strip loaded with food — and yet no famine was reported during that time, the report says.
Secondly, analysts wrongly calculated Gaza’s internal food production levels prior to the war; the conclusion becomes that as the war limited internal production, starvation inevitably resulted.
But the reality is not as Amnesty International claimed that 44% of Gaza food was locally produced. Local farmers and ranchers raise mostly expensive items, like meat, fish, vegetables and fruits — while the majority of the population consumes the bulk of calories from cereals and oils (not produced locally), the report says.
“The common assessments fail to account for available concerning Gaza’s extremely limited agriculture output and basic food consumption patterns of neighboring countries, which would have uncovered the implausible nature of their conclusions,” the report says.
A UNRWA report in May 2024 alleged that food-laden trucks had dropped 70% from pre-war levels, but “UNRWA was eventually forced to retroactively correct its figures, though these corrections were never publicly reported in the media.”
Does the international media corps acknowledge the false facts it desiminated?
“False reports concerning a drop in humanitarian supplies continue to be circulated, perpetuating claims of deliberate starvation,” the report says.
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