Israel trying to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza

The Guardian

4 days ago

Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible.
As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid.
The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, appeared to describe an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel has denied and said is not official policy.
Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza, including many child deaths, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'man-made mass starvation'.
That view was endorsed in a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,' the statement said. 'The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan's of human dignity.
'We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.'
Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there 'will be no starvation' in Gaza.
But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there 'is no hunger in Gaza' and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with 'underlying diseases'.
David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky News this week: 'There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.'
Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition.
Israel's attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation.
And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment, seen by Reuters, which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group of US-funded humanitarian supplies.
Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found 'no reports alleging Hamas' benefited from US-funded supplies.
Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a 'lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations'. Israel's claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution.
Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts.
Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; its sites have been the focus of numerous mass killings of desperate Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.
Israel's attempts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day.
He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of 'bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities'.
All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children.
'Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,' a WHO spokesperson said on Thursday.
More starvation deaths appear inevitable.