Tuesday, October 08, 2024
- Tuesday, October 08, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Back in June, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said that 342,000 Gazans were in Phase 5 - meaning famine conditions.
Hamas itself publishes the number of people it says have starved to death in Gaza as part of its daily propaganda posts on Telegram.
They also predicted that the number would increase to nearly 500,000 by the end of September.
Here is their definition of classifying an area with a solid or reasonable evidence of famine:
By their criteria, they believe that hundreds of thousands of people in areas in Gaza definitely have starvation and acute malnutrition, and therefore their experts can assume that the third factor, mortality, is occurring.
If the IPC assumptions are correct, even using the lower June figures, at least 2 people per 10,000 people should be dying every day - either 70 adults of 10 children, every day since June. The total for the past 100 days would be between 7,000 and 14,000 deaths from starvation.
On June 15, they claimed 33 deaths from famine.
Today, they claim 38.
Five is a significantly lower number than the 10,000 or so that IPC expected by now, according to their experts.
The lack of deaths of famine indicate that the other numbers they have been receiving on extreme lack of food and acute malnutrition have not been true either, because if they were true, then we would be seeing thousands more deaths than we are.
Meaning that there is a good chance Hamas is even manipulating the medical data in Gaza as a weapon against Israel, perhaps by instructing doctors what they must find in order to help the "resistance."
I don't think the IPC is corrupt. Their methodology is sound. But they never expected that they would be lied to. And when the emotionally charged accusation of famine makes headlines around the world, one can guarantee that Hamas would attempt to do everything possible to put the lie out in public - and they know that the journalists won't look too carefully at data that gets laundered through the objective lens of the IPC.