The New Data That Undermines Claims of Gaza Famine. Plus. . .
It’s Monday, August 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bill Barr on the Democrats’ antisemitism denial. Kara Kennedy on why moms are filming themselves throwing ice at bathtubs. Robert Wright on AI’s real threat. And much more.
But first: The data that should’ve been front page news—but wasn’t.
Almost exactly a year ago to the day, my colleagues and I uncovered in The Free Press that a dozen of the most viral images presented as evidence of famine in Gaza in fact showed children with unrelated medical issues, including cystic fibrosis and autoimmune conditions.
The investigation earned me death threats, calls for me to be tried at The Hague, and jabs by a high-profile comedian on national TV—despite the fact that we’ve had to issue exactly zero corrections on our story. That wasn’t the case for three of the news organizations that had run the images, which either updated or corrected their work because of what we reported.
Our point was simply to tell readers that if there was a famine in Gaza, photographs of these children were not evidence of it.
What is indisputable today is that there is currently no famine in Gaza. That is the major finding from a UNICEF-led team that recently produced the most comprehensive and robust nutrition survey of Gaza since the war began. It found that, less than a year after a famine was declared in Gaza, the territory has one of the lowest malnutrition rates in the region. A recovery that swift is not just “miraculous,” in the words of a malnutrition researcher I spoke with—it raises questions in and of itself. Questions like: How can a war-torn territory go from famine to showing some of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the region in less than a year?
In my report today, I investigate that question, its implications, and what it means for the debate over the official decision to classify a famine in Gaza to still be raging 12 months on.
—Olivia Reingold
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