This may come as some surprise, but only three per cent of the residents of Rafah, in Gaza, were poorly fed in May, according to the United Nations. In Khan Yunis and the central town of Deir al Balah, that figure stood at six per cent. The biggest challenges were faced by those who had failed to evacuate from the north at the start of the campaign. There, 13 per cent were found to be hungry. The overwhelming majority of Gazans had “acceptable” quantities of food.
Now consider the situation before Hamas brought catastrophe to Gaza. Despite billions of dollars of aid money pouring into the Strip, 14 per cent of the population faced hunger in 2022, according to a contemporaneous study by the World Food Programme. So it appears that provisions are better now than they were when Hamas was in charge.
Not that you’d know it from the reporting. In its analysis, the UN grudgingly concluded that it was “unable to endorse” the classification made by the likes of the head of the World Food Programme, who had claimed that Gaza had entered a “full-blown famine”. Was there an apology? Nope. The new line, spun by the UN and amplified by the BBC and fellow travellers, was that Gazans faced “catastrophic levels” of hunger.
Without wishing to minimise the deprivations of war, here was an object lesson in propaganda in the age of mass media.
Step eagerly forward the Guardian, which on Tuesday published an article headlined “The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s values”. The author, John Oakes, is a radical American intellectual, whose authority appears to rest on his book about the history of fasting. Whether he knows anything about the conflict or Judaism, or has ever met anybody from Gaza, is unclear. According to his website, his second book will be about the nature of intelligence.
“For many months now, it has been no secret that one of America’s closest allies has been using hunger as a weapon against a civilian population,” he wrote, perplexingly.
“That hunger is being used by Israel is supremely ironic, given the particular role that privation from food plays both in Jewish philosophy and in the grim history of the Jewish people.” Thank you, Oakes, for helping Jews with our morality.
This morning, I spoke to a friend in Gaza whom I made during my time as a foreign correspondent. He telephoned me from his stifling tent in Deir al Balah, which had been donated by the Saudis.
“Food is available, everything is available,” he told me. “Meat, chicken, vegetables. It is not aid. It is coming from Israel, brought in by private people through the Keren Shalom crossing and sold to us as a business. The prices are much better, just a little bit higher than before the war.”
This was a relief, he added, as for seven months, Hamas had been stealing humanitarian aid and selling it to the population at exorbitant rates. Now, goods are being bought and sold as normal. Everybody he knows hates the jihadists with a passion, he remarked, scoffing at polls showing widespread support for the group in Gaza.
A former BBC executive told me this week that the intensity of Israelophobic bias there after October 7 meant that he would have handed in his notice had he not already left the corporation. At least two Jewish journalists have resigned from the Guardian in disgust, while many of those who remain have accepted Faustian conditions.
Sometimes it seems that western progressives have more sympathy for Hamas and a greater alignment with its goals than those who have actually experienced jihadism in Gaza.
Jake Wallis Simons is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of ‘Israelophobia’