(An edited version of an article, by Oved Lobel, Policy Analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) appeared in the Canberra Times, July 2, 2024. Excerpts are posted below. Follow the link for the full article.)
The position of the most extreme anti-Israel activists, whether in the media, politics, international institutions or NGOs, regarding Israel’s war with Hamas has been based on two key planks: that the IDF is indiscriminately killing civilians and that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s population.
For the first assertion, they rely on casualty statistics, including gender and age breakdowns, released by Hamas-run organs in Gaza. For the second, they depend on UN agencies for the numbers of aid trucks and projections of famine in parts of Gaza.
Both planks have now collapsed.
Multiple independent analyses of the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (MoH) casualty data have long since demonstrated that the casualty numbers contained statistical anomalies indicating they were clearly heavily manipulated if not outright fabricated. All concluded that both the topline number as well as gender and age breakdowns were completely unreliable.
…The second plank completely collapsed in late May, when the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee (FRC) – the UN’s expert committee on identifying famine – released its review of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) analysis of the Northern Governorates of Gaza.
Asserting that the analysis had made unwarranted assumptions and inexplicably excluded important sources of food aid – and that there simply wasn’t nearly enough solid data – the FRC said it didn’t find the FEWS NET analysis asserting Gaza was suffering famine “plausible”. A comprehensive FRC report published June 25 concluded that “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.”
…It is abundantly clear that the problem in Gaza is not primarily enough aid entering the territory, but distribution, as it is in nearly every war zone. Due to mass looting, destroyed infrastructure, bureaucratic delays, logistical shortfalls, UN agency fears of deconfliction and the fighting itself, more than 1,000 truckloads of aid already in Gaza are currently awaiting pickup.
…The most radical activists have promoted the most extreme fantasy to paint Israeli behaviour as genocidal based on bad or manipulated data supplied by Hamas and the UN. This data itself now points in quite a different direction.
Follow this link to read the full article: https://aijac.org.au/op-ed/another-plank-of-the-extreme-anti-israel-narrative-collapses/