IDF: No famine in Gaza, but if UN keeps holding back 950 trucks, could be
Despite global claims, there is no famine in Gaza as of yet, the IDF said on Tuesday.
However, it cautioned, the UN and other international aid groups currently have a record 950 trucks sitting on the Gaza side of the border that they are failing to bring to Gazans.
All of this comes amid worldwide media coverage, based on Hamas Health Ministry reports, claiming that 15 Palestinians have died of starvation in the last 24 hours and that 600,000 people in Gaza – nearly one third of the population – are suffering from malnutrition.
A top IDF official met with leading UN bureaucrats regarding the issue on Tuesday, demanding to know how they could accuse Israel of causing famine in Gaza, which, again, has not happened yet but might shortly should the UN continue to abandon its trucks – while simultaneously leaving the aid trucks to sit there without distributing the food.
According to the senior IDF official, the UN bureaucrats sat quietly for at least 20 seconds, struggling to come up with a response. Eventually, one of them said that they would make more of an effort to get the trucks moving again, the IDF reported.
Why aren't the UN aid truck moving?
Next, the military said that 30 out of the 70 approved aid trucks were moved into Gaza on Tuesday.
The IDF provided several reasons as to why the UN trucks have been sitting by the border. Some had to do with the UN's refusal to abide by the IDF's regulations about which products could go in and which could not, something that the IDF could alleviate by lowering its standards temporarily.
But other reasons concerned the UN's unwillingness to move through certain areas that the IDF said were secure, but that the UN did not take its word for it, refusing to advance.
Regarding the many photos and videos being distributed of sick Palestinian children with clear signs of malnutrition, the army said that many of these children have diseases unrelated to the state of food in Gaza, and that others are the same child being reused in different contexts.
IDF sources did not address whether some of the diseases after 21 months of war could be war-related and malnutrition-related.
It admitted that food security in Gaza right now is at a dangerous point, but not that it has fallen off the cliff, and that quick action by the UN with its 950 approved aid trucks could rapidly address the issue.
How does the IDF determine whether there is enough food available to Gazans at any given moment in time, and what caused a senior official to meet with the UN on Tuesday to get the aid trucks moving?
There are several factors the IDF looks at.
First, it categorizes how many calories of food are on each truck and cross-references this to around how many Palestinians are in one area or another.
Second, the IDF speaks to UN officials who live and work on the ground in Gaza to get their updated evaluation, something which the IDF says is more honest than what is portrayed by top UN officials with foreign policy agendas in New York or Geneva.
Third, the IDF speaks to Palestinians in different areas to get their direct responses on how they are doing.
Fourth, the military has classified intelligence methods for monitoring the situation.
Pressed that the IDF's data flies in the face of contrary data by virtually every aid group and country in the world that are following the issue, army sources said that they trust the sources in Gaza that they speak to.
IDF sources added that the Gazans they speak to also criticize the IDF sometimes, including recently over the IDF's actions in Deir el-Balah, which have harmed some of those Gazans' residential areas.
According to the military, there is a 'data wash' process going on by which Hamas sends out 'reports' to local UN Gazan officials who then launder the Hamas propaganda as Gaza Health Ministry claims that then arrive to the UN in New York as though they are the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs branch's statements, and then they are cited by global media as official UN statistics.
IDF sources said that they have confidentially sent intelligence on the subject in legal briefs to international courts in The Hague (they did not say whether this was the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court) to give them a clearer picture of what is fact and what is propaganda.
Despite IDF claims, the very urgency that the IDF expressed on Tuesday showed that whether there is famine at this moment or not, the food situation in Gaza is desperate or closer to desperate compared to many earlier stages of the war.
All of this takes place as the UN and many international aid groups are also trying to pressure Israel to drop the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as a food aid distributor.
They accuse the GHF or the IDF, or a combination of the two, of a chaotic food distribution process that has allegedly resulted in the deaths of several hundred Palestinians.
The GHF has responded by denying that any Palestinians have died at its sites, other than in one incident, where armed Hamas terrorists were actively inciting the crowd to trample each other and were armed, and involved in some attacks inside the site.
Per the IDF, there have been several incidents of mistakenly shooting Palestinian civilians who were on their way to the GHF sites, when these individuals approached IDF forces in a way that made troops feel that they were in danger.
These incidents are being probed, but no IDF officials have been publicly prosecuted to date.
Both the IDF and the GHF have said that their work is crucial to break Hamas's control over the food in Gaza, a form of dominance that the terrorist organization uses to lord over the Gazan population.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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