Trucks carrying humanitarian aid move through a checkpoint at the Zikim Crossing Point on Nov. 25, 2025, in Israel. The United States is working with the international community to facilitate the flow of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Malcolm Cohens-Ashley.)
Almost from the beginning of the IDF-Hamas war, many UN officials and so-called experts have made dire predictions concerning famine and child malnutrition. These claims exploded when in 2025 Israel suspended and then restricted food deliveries for three months; and were uncritically accepted by broad sections of the media, helping turn Israel into a pariah state. Finally, in 2026 a comprehensive UNICEF report presented findings that fundamentally contradicted the famine and malnutrition claims.
Read more The Truth About ‘It Didn’t Start on October 7’
Notably, the UNICEF-led team also revealed that Gaza now faces a new challenge: obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5.
Almost immediately after the IDF-Hamas war began, the specter of famine was broadcast by critics. In January 2024, one of the world’s leading famine experts Alex de Wall gave Gaza two weeks until catastrophic mass starvation:
I’ve not seen anything like this before.… Famine probably by early February [2024] … Starvation deaths will soon exceed those directly from violence.… A catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime.
In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of USAID, became the first U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun. Simultaneously, UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote on X: “Just when it seems there are no words left to describe the living hell in Gaza, a new one has been added: ‘famine.’”
When these expectations did not materialize, critics claimed risks remained high because food shipments were well below the necessary 500 truck per day. This figure was based on the 330 trucks per day that entered in early 2023 plus the lost Gazan food production.
The problem with this projection is that half of the prewar truck shipments were construction goods and only the equivalent of 75 trucks daily contained food shipments. As to Gaza food production, almost all of it was fruits and vegetables that 44 percent of the value of agricultural products consumed but only 14 percent of caloric intake. Thus, at most 100 trucks would be needed to maintain food consumption.
Due to pressure, Israel did allow 500 trucks daily to enter Gaza during the January through March 2025 ceasefire so that a substantial food stockpile was created. However, when Israel suspended food supplies in early March and placed restrictions on deliveries from late April through mid-July, claims of starvation and malnutrition exploded. Though the Hamas Ministry of Health announcement that only 111 Gazans had died of starvation since the start of the war through early July 2025, it reported that 60 more deaths occurred during the next few weeks.
Almost immediately major news outlets published manipulated pictures of allegedly severely malnourished children. The most infamous was the frontpage New York Times picture of an emaciated-looking child who was later found to have a severe genetic disease. The photo had been cropped to eliminate his robust looking slightly older brother. The Times‘s Nicolas Kristof claimed mass starvation was afoot.
Read more Is Religion Really About God?
A UN–affiliated hunger-monitoring organization, IPC, claimed that despite the resumption of unrestricted food deliveries on July 20 — averaging 350 trucks daily — the share of children suffering from acute malnutrition increased from 8.7 percent in July to 13.4 percent in August. This was the picture presented by critics until the war ended in early December.
On July 22, 2026 a UNICEF-led team measuring hunger in Gaza released the most comprehensive analysis since war broke out. Olivia Reingold reported in The Free Press,
The Gaza Nutrition SMART Survey found “wasting,” using a term for extreme thinness, “is low across all domains, suggesting no widespread acute malnutrition at population level.” At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.
“I thought it would be much higher, to be honest,” said Elena Naumova, a Tufts University professor of nutrition epidemiology and data science, about the stunting rate in Gaza.
Notably, the UNICEF-led team also revealed that Gaza now faces a new challenge: obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5. A researcher who has overseen teams collecting malnutrition data in the Horn of Africa remarked that she had “never seen” the emergence of obesity and excess weight in a place that was declared only a year earlier to be suffering from famine.
The UNICEF evidence of limited stunted growth of Gazan children compared to neighboring Muslim countries is part of a larger picture. Thanks to generous foreign aid, many Gazans had middle-class standards of living before the war, testified to by the 44 percent of their consumption expenditures on locally-produced fruits and vegetables and their extensive medical and educational facilities. These factors probably helped insulate Gazan children from more damaging war effects.
Unfortunately, the starvation and acute malnutrition claims follow a familiar pattern: critics forecast damaging outcomes that don’t occur and ignore contradictory data. Compounding the problem is a Western media and academic establishment eager to portray Israel as a uniquely malevolent oppressor and therefore willing to accept claims from demonstrably partisan sources without sufficient scrutiny. Hopefully, the new evidence will become more widely known, reducing the influence of damaging claims made by Israel’s opponents.
READ MORE from Robert Cherry:
Head Start Isn’t the Answer: Strengthen Parents, Don’t Replace Them
Mamdani Peddles the Myths Fueling Democrats’ Antisemitism
Halftime Hype and Cultural Blind Spots
Robert Cherry@robertcherry22 is American Enterprise affiliate and author ofArab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, 2026).
Read more California’s New Tire Efficiency Rules Put Government in the Driver’s Seat
About the Author
