Gazans Guzzling Groceries, or Falasteen Fainting from Famine?
An amusing tale from days of yore involves a poor man coming to Rothschild (the term of art for any rich Jew in those days) and telling him he had not eaten in days.
Rothchild responds: “Then force yourself!”
From the outset of this war precipitated by the savage, animalistic and barbaric raping, pillaging, massacring and hostage taking by Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazan civilians, philo-Philistines have been screaming shrilly about a deliberate mass-starvation being imposed by the Israeli government on the destitute masses of the strip. Horrific images of small children clearly suffering from appalling malnutrition are being touted as evidence for this heinous claim. Calls of “collective punishment”, “genocide” and Naziism are hurled at the Jewish state, and it does beg the question: is Israel deliberately starving the Gazans?
For the purposes of this article, let us ignore the fact that many of the horrible photos of apparently starving children include their mothers who clearly would benefit from a diet of one description or another. Let us not scorn UNRWA, the UN organisation charged with aiding, abetting and participating in terrorism, whose eminently reliable predictions of “imminent famine” being but a week away have consistently been a week away from the previous week’s dire warnings of famine being but a week away. Instead, we will examine whatever facts we can glean from open-source intelligence as well as other sources in order to make the case one way or another, after a hopefully brief overview.
Currently there are two main players in Gaza: Hamas and the IDF. On the peripheries are the various clans who each have their own arenas of dominance, but are nonetheless either in the thrall or under the thumb of Hamas, consequently they are bit players of little influence.
The few NGOs that still operate in Gaza are doing so at the sufferance of Hamas, as was seen with the World Central Kitchen debacle, in which Hamas “operatives” managed to dupe the IDF in bombing three of their vehicles.
All of this makes it impossible to rely on information from the ground, since anything coming out of Gaza is going to either be Hamas-filtered propaganda of no value whatsoever or from other parties who require the worst possible scenarios in order to raise more funds and garner more attention, who hence have all the credibility of a 7 dollar note.
The average person, if such in individual actually exists, requires between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day. Given many of the images coming out from Gaza on Spy Tok and other social media that are being posted by Gazans themselves of rather corpulent individuals, one has to err towards the higher end of the spectrum, so let’s settle for 2,300 calories per day. Children require less than this, approximately 1,600 – 1,880 calories per day.
As the media has noted ad nauseum, the overwhelming majority of the population in Gaza are children, between 45 and 50 percent of the overall residents. Given the above figures, the required amount of calories per day for the entire population in Gaza is approximately 4,357,500,000.
The calorific value of food varies considerably, and popular goodies in the strip such as knafeh contain sufficient calories from the sugar to ensure the early onset of diabetes if more than one small serving is consumed, as well as representing almost a third of the daily required intake. We shall ignore those.
At a more practical level, 1kg of bread will contain anything from 2,200 to 2700 calories, dependant on the flour employed.
Were only bread to be supplied as aid, which is certainly not the case as shall be seen later, then roughly 1,815 tons would have to be supplied daily, for a total of 497,481 tons, up until the 7th July 2024 – 274 days since the vicious, barbaric and brutal invasion of Israel by Hamas and ordinary Gazans on the 7thof October, 2023. Set this aside for the moment.
As it so happens, the Israeli Ministry of Defence has a special unit responsible for implementing the government's civilian policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, known by its acronym as COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). During the current hostilities they have been responsible for supplying their enemy with aid donated by various countries.
In order to facilitate the rapid distribution of aid whilst ensuring that the situation is not taken advantage of by Hamas for smuggling weapons into Gaza, COGAT created several check points at which the palettes are examined. The capacity has been steadily increased as the war has progressed.
As of 30thJune 2024 (the most recent overall update), COGAT has processed a total of 724,475 tons of aid, of which 565,000 tons are food. The cynic might argue that Israel is inflating these figures, however the UN - whose love for Israel is similar to that of a rottweiler for the postman’s leg – has yet to challenge these substantively (COGAT has presented a comprehensive analysis here https://govextra.gov.il/media/dtmhzmtn/discrepancies-in-un-aid-to-gaza-data-2.pdf, where the word “discrepancies” is diplomatically employed to mean “lying through their teeth”. They certainly whine about food distribution and anything else they pluck out of the thin air, however when challenged to dispute these figures they have failed to do so in any meaningful manner. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that COGAT is not lying, or at least not to the same degree Hamas is infamous for, or that the UN does by omission as and when convenient.
If we divide the total food provided to Gaza by COGAT by the number of days they have been doing so, we arrive at a figure of 2,116 tons daily, when only 1,815 tons per day are required. This results in Israel having facilitated 80,228 surplus tons so far, an excess of some 300 tons per day.
Bear in mind that food has been supplied by various other – at times wildly unsuccessful - means, such as airdrops and the ill-fated JLOTS pier.
However, the picture is not entirely rosy. The process of distribution requires parcels to be examined by Israel at the Keren Shalom and Erez crossings, after which various agencies collect the inspected aid and deliver it into Gaza. Here is where things start to break down.
The UN still operates the UNRWA agency as its main delivery organisation, although there are other NGOs involved in distribution within Gaza. The professionalism of UNRWA has never been particularly impressive or efficient, and this has resulted in over 1,000 truck loads of aid waiting to be picked up from Kerem Shalom for delivery into Gaza, as well as over 1,500 pallets yet to be distributed from the JLOTS port on the Gazan side.
The chaos hardly ends there. Numerous videos from within Gaza have testified to armed Hamas thugs appropriating trucks for their own purposes. An UNRWA warehouse bombed by Israel was found to be filled to the rafters with food, which Hamas had been hoarding for their own nefarious activities. An infamous tweet deleted by UNRWA confirming the theft of fuel and medical supplies by Hamas was quietly deleted by them hours later, bereft of an plausible explanation (https://msn.com/en-us/news/world/un...of-stealing-humanitarian-supplies/ar-AA1ijjfu).
Hamas has co-opted UNRWA and the UN as part of their unbridled violations of international law. The UN reluctantly confirmed that Hamas terrorists were recorded in an aid warehouse after the IDF released a video showing gunmen there, who were also operating UN vehicles (https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cljdjw2jrnzo).
The upshot of this is that no matter how much aid enters the strip, Hamas criminality is a variable that Israel cannot regulate, given that the terrorists embed themselves in the civilian population and do not wear recognisable uniforms - itself a violation of the Geneva Convention and the customs and laws of warfare.
Given all this, is there any other way to determine the level of food supplies in Gaza? Well, unsurprisingly, there certainly is.
One of the great benefits of the modern internet and its edge technologies such as mobile phones is that every fool can upload their undiluted verbiage, in text or video, at the tap of an icon. Whilst this generally results in videos of cute kittens and defaced images of the Mona Lisa, it also allows Gazan to upload evidence of the horrors taking place in Gaza.
One of the finest channels dedicated to documenting these heart-wrenching moments is
@imshin
on X (https://x.com/imshin) who trawls the darker regions of the interwebs such as Spy Tok, for videos that Gazans themselves record, and includes the source and timestamps of the uploads. One of the more recent videos documents Gazan media star Eman Lulu making basbousa with dates and sufficient vegetable oil to power a small generator for a week. Another documents the El-Sada Shafout Restaurant, formerly of Zeitoun, Gaza City, having relocated to Deir al-Balah, Central Gaza Strip. They are advertising their wares, including 1kg of barbequed chicken wings at 35 shekels ($9.50) and 1kg shishlik at 70 shekels ($19). A video posted on the 6thof July 2024 is entitled "80 aid trucks entering North Gaza - Now".
A video consisting of clips culled from various Palestinian authors published on the 4thJuly 2024 features numerous locations in which considerable quantities of food including shawarma, baked goods and produce (https://x.com/LollllllaJR/status/1808852144105144337).
The official X channel of COGAT (@cogatonline) has an incessant stream of photographic and video evidence of the considerable amounts of quite varied food available in Gazan markets
All of this requires considerable water for production, and of course the Gazans require drinking water as well, which brings us to the next libel.
One of the accusations levelled against Israel is that they are denying Gazans access to potable water. The day before the heinous, barbaric attack by Hamas on Israel, 90% of the water in Gaza was self-sourced; Israel only supplied 10% of their water. During the early phase of the war, Israel opened two water mains at Birkat Sa'id and Bani Suheila to provide water to hundreds of thousands of residents in the Central and Southern Gaza Strip. It was only a matter of weeks into the ground offensive that Hamas destroyed a section of these two water mains, forcing the IDF to repair them under fire, after which Hamas promptly destroyed them again, requiring yet another repair by the IDF engineers, again under fire by Hamas. There is in fact a comprehensive list of works undertaken by Israel and the IDF to secure water for Gaza, available here: https://govextra.gov.il/cogat/humanitarian-efforts/home/(scroll down to the “Infrastructure” tab).
Meanwhile, due to the war as well as the outrageous corruption of Hamas, potable water has become a significant issue. In order to mitigate this, COGAT has facilitated over 41,000 tons of bottled water, which is sufficient to supply every Gazan with 3 litres of water for roughly six and half days. If this was the only supply of water, then Gazans would have all died a long time ago, perhaps two to three weeks into the war.
As it happens, the inimitable Imshin mentioned previously posted a video that originated from inside Gaza on the 12th of June in which "Marah and Nashat have fun in the kiddy pool" in Deir al-Balah, Central Gaza Strip, to which they have added some liquid soap "to make it more refreshing". Were Gaza bereft of water, this would be suicidal.
One might wonder what the awful pictures of misshapen, shrivelled babies and small children with stick limbs are portraying, then. Surely they must have died of malnutrition? The truth is that all those photos – without exception – are of children with very serious medical issues, either congenital diseases or terrible illnesses contracted some time after birth. Some of these poor children are in fact Syrian, have died several years ago and had never stepped foot into Gaza. Philo-Philistines are not above using deception and outrageous lied to perpetuate their libelling of Israel, the IDF and Jews in general. For a fascinating vignette into the myths surrounding babies dying of starvation in Gaza, read this: https://jihadwatch.org/2024/07/are-babies-in-gaza-dying-of-malnutrition.
It's worth noting that stellar figures such as John Spencer, Col. Richard Kemp, Douglas Murray and Mossab Hassan Youssef have been photographed in Gaza right up close to the battlefront as well as elsewhere in the region, and have confirmed that the supply of aid to the strip has been, at the very least, outstanding.
Even third-party organisations, such as the creatively named Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee (FRC), have examined purported claims such as those from the FEWS (Famine Early Warning Systems Network) of starvation in Gaza and have found them to be less than entirely credible, and therefore have not endorsed their report (https://ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_..._Committee_Report_FEWS_NET_Gaza_4June2024.pdf).
All this ignores the fact that an unknown number of supposed civilians are complicit in terror and the fighting either by actively participating in the combat or assisting Hamas. Many private homes in Gaza contain weapons caches, which would then designate the residence as a military target. This in turn impacts the count of civilians, and therefore the amount of aid actually required. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Israel would be required to support their enemy's army with food.
In conclusion, the purported starvation and water shortages in Gaza are not borne out by the evidence; if there are in fact people starving, then it rests entirely at the feet of those charming terrorists who are Hamas, a group whose concern for their own people is even less apparent than - were that to even be possible - that of Kim Jong-un of North Korean fame.
The truth will eventually out, but for the moment it has done its damage and enabled the new wave of Jew-hatred to flourish like a wildfire. It leaves us ought but to quote King Solomon, who so wisely wrote in Proverbs (12:19): “The lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment.”
. They certainly whine about food distribution and anything else they pluck out of the thin air, however when challenged to dispute these figures they have failed to do so in any meaningful manner. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that COGAT is not lying, or at least not to the same degree Hamas is infamous for, or that the UN does by omission as and when convenient.
