Part of the IPC's "famine" determination was based on the absurd idea that Hamas *undercounts" starvation deaths ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Part of the IPC's "famine" determination was based on the absurd idea that Hamas *undercounts" starvation deaths

There have been a number of excellent detailed criticisms of the IPC report that claimed that parts of Gaza are now officially in a state of famine. The NCRI released two such reports, summarized here.

I found one major problem with the IPC report that I didn't see anyone else address.

The IPC made a remarkable claim: Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MoH) undercounts non-trauma deaths, especially those linked to hunger. This appears on pp. 22–23 of the IPC Famine Review Committee (FRC) report, and it serves as a crucial plank in their case that famine was already underway in Gaza Governorate.

The claim is not just weak. It is flatly contradicted by Hamas’ and the MoH's own behavior.

Every day, Hamas’ official Telegram channel publishes the alleged total number of starvation deaths in Gaza. These figures are trumpeted as evidence of deliberate Israeli “genocide.” Far from ignoring or downplaying non-trauma mortality, Hamas actively foregrounds it for propaganda purposes.

This is the opposite of what you would expect if the MoH were “failing to capture” malnutrition or disease deaths. In fact, the MoH has an incentive structure that strongly favors maximizing those figures. Starvation deaths are propaganda wins - why would they undercount them?

Yet the FRC writes that the MoH “focuses mainly on trauma-related deaths and fails to capture much of the non-traumatic mortality,” adding that “different analyses indicate that MoH data systematically underestimate overall mortality.”

And then, on page 25, the report made the key leap:

Direct evidence on nutrition-related mortality is not available. Indirect evidence suggests that deaths primarily due to undernutrition significantly exceed reported deaths. The MoH mortality counts are those that die in a health facility or whose body is taken to a health facility, missing deaths in the community.

In fact, the MoH takes pains to count deaths beyond those in hospitals. All of its social media ask that Gazans fill out forms for "martyrs" not known to the ministry. About 24% of their deaths counted are self-reported (12,914 as of the May 11 MoH report.) So here the FRC is quite provably wrong.

These indirect sources evidence indicate a much higher mortality rate than malnutrition deaths reported by the Ministry of Health, providing reasonable evidence that mortality thresholds for famine have been passed. The FRC considers the analysis team’s current classification (IPC Phase 5 Famine with reasonable evidence) to be plausible.

There is zero evidence that the MoH is undercounting starvation deaths by orders of magnitude necessary to justify the famine accusation.

If we take the MoH at its word, then 24% of all deaths in Gaza are not taken to hospitals. Presumably most of those are people who were killed instantly by bombs. Injured people don't stay home to die, and neither do people in danger of dying by starvation. We would expect close to 100% of the starvation deaths to happen in hospitals. The IPC's assumptions are way, way off.

But even their indirect evidence doesn't add up.

While the FRC paper does not give footnotes to the "indirect evidence" claims, the language strongly suggests that they are leaning on secondary studies - including Lancet analyses I’ve already dissected for their flaws, like the "capture-recapture" methodology that was wrong to begin with. Or studies that assume Hamas was telling the truth when it claimed that there were 11,000 missing in the rubble which turned out to be completely false. Or other studies that compare reported and unreported deaths in other wars, but do not account for the fact that Hamas is the source of all reported deaths and therefore its counts are not at all comparable to those of independent medical professionals or NGOs in other conflict zones.

The IPC did not explain why these fragile models were weighted more heavily than the MoH’s own daily reporting - reporting that, again, is biased toward inflation, not suppression. As we've seen countless times, many of the deaths blamed on starvation were in fact pre-existing medical conditions.

Mortality is the most decisive evidence in famine classification. When direct evidence is weak, IPC allows “reasonable evidence” to substitute. But here, the FRC crossed a line: it made the false assumption of undercounting part of its formal justification for declaring famine. They do not describe their "reasonable evidence" in ways that stand up to scrutiny, and the counter-evidence is not only available but also follows common sense - few people starve to death at home. Without these false and biased assumptions, the mortality data would not have come close to meeting famine thresholds.

This is not scientific caution. It is narrative-building.

The IPC’s famine declaration carries enormous weight in diplomacy, law, and media. That makes methodological rigor non-negotiable. Yet the FRC leaned on a claim that collapses under the most basic scrutiny: Hamas is not undercounting famine deaths. It is advertising them daily.

Until the IPC can produce independent, time-matched, probability-based mortality surveys that genuinely show undercounting, its conclusion should be treated as speculative. And if the famine finding depends on that speculation, then its credibility is compromised at the core.