According to the IPC, an area is considered to be in famine when three things occur: 20% of households have an extreme lack of food, or essentially starving; at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, meaning they’re too thin for their height; and two adults or four children per every 10,000 people are dying daily of hunger and its complications.In northern Gaza, the first condition of extreme lack of food has been met, senior WFP spokesman Steve Taravella told The Associated Press. The second condition of child acute malnutrition is nearly met, he said. But the death rate could not be verified.
.... “The bottom line is that people are practically dying from a lack of food, water and medicines. If we are waiting for the moment when all the facts are in hand to verify the final conditions to scientifically declare a famine, it would be after thousands of people have perished,” Taravella said.
In January, the UN said that 378,000 Gazans were at the IPC5 stage. In March, they said that 677,000 Gazans were at IPC5. And they predicted that by July the number would be 1,107,000 people.
Using the January numbers, we should expect - according to the IPC's own definitions - 75 adults or 150 children dying every day in Gaza from malnutrition. Using the March numbers, those statistics should be 136 adults or 272 children a day. According to their projections for a month from now, there should be 220 adults or 440 children dying every day in Gaza.
The actual number is zero.
According to the Hamas health ministry, 28 people - all children - died of starvation by the end of March. Many of the children who died were given large amounts of coverage by the media.
But since then we have not heard about a single additional death from starvation, when the numbers were supposed to accelerate - not from the media and not from the Gaza health authorities.
If dozens or hundreds of Gazans were starving to death every day, you can be sure that the health ministry would be shouting this from the rooftops - which in fact they did when the number was 28. Al Jazeera reporters who have unusually excellent access to all Gaza hospitals would be taking lots of videos of emaciated, wasted children dying or dead in hospitals. It would be hard to hide hundreds of deaths a day if Gaza authorities wanted to - and they certainly don't want to.
If no one is dying, then half of Gaza cannot be in IPC5.
What can explain the huge disconnect? If a large percentage of children have measurably thin arm circumferences, why aren't we hearing about them dying?
I'm not seeing any of the experts who wrote the IPC report in mid-March issuing any clarifications about their predictions. Their prediction of 1.1 million Gazans in IPC5 remains on their dashboard today.
Either the raw data on family access to food and measurable factors of severely underweight children is being falsified, or there is a lot more food in Gaza than we are being led to believe.
Either way, we are not being told the truth. And that should concern every consumer of news and NGO reports. Because if something that is supported by so many scientists and data analysts who do not have obvious biases is proven to be so incredibly wrong, how can anyone believe anything that they are hearing about Gaza?
To add another absurdity, th AP article tried to answer the question of why there is so little data on people starving to death, and its answer shows the hypocrisy of the media:
[Verifying the death rate from starvation] is difficult. Aid groups note that Israeli airstrikes and raids have devastated medical facilities in northern Gaza and displaced much of the population. Along with restrictions on access, they complicate the ability to formally collect data on deaths.
So let's get this straight: the Hamas authorities are believed when they say exactly how many Gazans are killed by the war, but when it comes to deaths by starvation the data gathering is suddenly neat to impossible?
