By Yehuda Teitelbaum
It was always strange that Hamas managed to convince so much of the world that Gaza was starving. Anyone who has studied or lived through real famine knows it looks nothing like what we were shown. Real famine is unmistakable. There is no ambiguity. It strips away everything. In Yemen, in Sudan, in Ethiopia, the evidence was everywhere. Children so emaciated they could not stand. Mothers too weak to carry them. Families dying in the streets because there was simply nothing left to eat. Those images were burned into the world’s memory because they could not be denied.
When you looked at Gaza, none of that existed. There were no pictures of groups of skeletal children sitting in rubble, no photos of neighborhoods reduced to wandering ghosts. What we saw instead were markets filled with produce, bakeries still open, and restaurants crowded late into the night. Countless videos came out of Gaza, not from Israeli sources or foreign reporters, but from Gazans themselves, showing normal commerce and daily life continuing amid the war. That did not mean life was easy. It was not. War creates chaos. Distribution networks break down. Prices rise. People go hungry. But that is not famine.
Famine is the collapse of an entire social fabric. It is starvation so deep that the weak simply disappear. It is the unraveling of families and the death of entire communities. It cannot be hidden or managed. When famine takes hold, the evidence becomes overwhelming and impossible to ignore. Gaza never looked like that, and the difference matters because words matter. When the word “famine” is used, it is not just describing a humanitarian crisis, it is triggering a political and legal framework. It transforms a tragic situation into an accusation of criminal intent.
The story itself was not new. Gaza had supposedly been starving since 2005. Each year the same claims returned under different slogans, siege, starvation, food insecurity, blockade. The language always shifted, but the accusation remained the same. In 2018, Oxfam declared that a million Gazans could not feed their families. Others echoed it without evidence, repeating it because it was convenient and effective.
Meanwhile, Israel became the only country in modern history to send food into the territory of an enemy it was fighting. Millions of pounds of supplies crossed the border even as rockets were launched at the crossing points. Over two million tons of humanitarian aid entered Gaza during the war, more than enough to feed its civilian population. Yet the United Nations still declared famine, because once you call it that, the entire framework shifts. A famine allows the narrative to move from a battlefield to a courtroom. It turns a war for survival into a moral trial. It lets international organizations accuse Israel of crimes rather than confront Hamas for creating the conditions of war in the first place.
That was always the purpose. The famine story was never meant to describe reality. Hamas understood that it could not win militarily. Its only chance was to win through narrative. Every image of destruction, every hungry child, every collapsed building could be repurposed into a weapon. And the international community played along. NGOs repeated the talking points as fact, journalists published them without verification, and politicians echoed them in speeches. The repetition was the point. Once said often enough, the lie began to sound like truth.
Inside Gaza, food was never truly the issue. Control was. Hamas controlled everything, the aid distribution, the warehouses, the access to supplies. Loyalists received food first. Fighters and their families were fed before anyone else. Ordinary people were kept desperate because desperation creates sympathy. The goal was to sustain the crisis long enough to turn public opinion against Israel.
And the world helped make that possible. The United Nations continued to fund UNRWA, an agency that has long since abandoned the idea of resettlement or reconciliation and instead exists to preserve refugee status indefinitely. Western governments poured billions into a system that guarantees permanent dependency. Human rights organizations repeated Hamas propaganda almost word for word, dressing it up as analysis. Major media outlets presented Hamas press releases as verified reporting. Western politicians followed along because it was easier than facing their own role in enabling a movement built on hate.
If the same claims had been made about Yemen or Sudan, the world would have demanded evidence. They would have sent photographers and researchers. But when it came to Gaza, the absence of evidence was treated as proof. The more the claim unraveled, the louder it was repeated. The famine narrative was never intended to help the people of Gaza. It was designed to weaponize their suffering against Israel.
Now that the war has seemingly ended, the truth is difficult to ignore. Gaza endured hardship and hunger. Lives were lost. But there was no famine. What there was, was manipulation, by Hamas, by NGOs, by journalists who knew better, and by international bodies that long ago abandoned integrity for politics. Yet the damage is done. The famine that never existed will live on in the archives of the United Nations, in the speeches of activists, and in the history books of the future.
That is how propaganda becomes history. The lie survives because it is useful, and the truth fades because it is inconvenient. The famine in Gaza was never real, but it achieved what it was meant to achieve. It turned the defense of a nation into a moral indictment, and it ensured that even in victory, Israel would stand accused.
Friday, October 24, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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