Never in recorded history has an area stricken by famine one year been faced with an obesity crisis the next.
That should surprise nobody, of course, because even when famines are caused by events such as war disrupting food supplies, it's impossible to restore distribution systems to normal and to ensure that everybody has access to much more than the minimum standards necessary to sustain human life.
Never, that is, until this year. For some reason, in the "open air prison" of Gaza, where a literal genocide was taking place mere months ago, we were told, obesity among children is a serious problem.
You would think that data showing remarkably low levels of child malnutrition in Gaza would be front page news.
— Olivia Reingold (@Olivia_Reingold) August 24, 2026
Nope. Perhaps because the data is causing experts to ask: should a famine even have been declared in Gaza in the first place? https://t.co/83Rj6hpczN
That's not Israeli propaganda. The data comes from the United Nations, the same NGO that declared Gaza was facing famine. In fact, the United Nations, based on no serious data at all, kept on telling us that Gaza was facing famine and the imminent death of thousands or tens of thousands of children from starvation throughout the Gaza war.
Yet now that they have actual data collected in a rigorous way, and not based on the "data" put out by the "Gaza Health Ministry" and the UNRWA-associated propagandists, the remarkably uncelebrated fact that starvation is not a problem has emerged.
n July 22, a UNICEF-led team measuring hunger in Gaza uploaded a presentation containing its most comprehensive analysis since war broke out nearly three years ago.
The report, titled “Gaza Nutrition SMART Survey Result,” revealed a stark reversal from the declarations made almost exactly a year ago that a dire famine was ravaging the war-torn territory.
“Wasting,” the report said, 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, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. 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.
The UNICEF-led team’s presentation 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.
Famine is, unfortunately, something we know quite a bit about. It has been something of a constant in human life throughout history, and in the modern world it is almost always the result of war and government malfeasance.
So we don't have to guess what would happen a year after a famine is declared. We have plenty of experience with famine and how regions recover from it, and it simply is not like this.
Which is, of course, my point: the famine never existed in the first place, no matter how much wishcasting there was from the Israel-hating NGO complex and media. It was a construct of propaganda, and there has been lots of evidence to back that up, even when the hard data was not available.
You literally cannot make this up
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 7, 2026
The photojournalist of this front page NYT piece Saher Alghorra just won a Pulitzer Prize
NYT had to issue a retraction because the entire story was fake
So you can win a pulitzer now after fabricating an entire hoax story 🤡
Unreal pic.twitter.com/BgWufhZIBo
The United Nations helped lead the famine hoax, but it never would have taken off and become accepted reality but for the fact that the media desperately wanted to paint Israel as monstrous Nazi-wannabes. The UN churns out apocalyptic reports about all sorts of tragedies and atrocities about which the average Westerner knows little to nothing, so it's striking that everybody in the known universe was convinced that Gazans were dropping like flies from malnutrition.
In the now-great tradition of the Pulitzer Prizes, hoax photographs were awarded the prestigious prize even though they didn't actually portray what they purported. It's a mirror of the Washington Post and New York Times getting the Pulitzer for their Russiagate coverage, which also was based on a hoax.
There never was a famine in Gaza, but that fact has not and will never penetrate the minds of those who have been indoctrinated to believe there was. At best, people will acknowledge that some bits and pieces of the story were mangled, but they will trot out the same types of excuses we are subjected to when it comes to Fauci and COVID.
"It was the best we could do at the time, given conditions."
Yeah, well, no. It was then and remains today an ongoing hoax, and the impressions created have become reality for many people.
Given the media focus on the famine declaration, you might think that the latest data would be front-page news. Not so. The fact that Gaza has experienced a dramatic improvement has been hard to find in the mainstream press. Other than a few write-ups by Fox News and Israel-based news organizations, there has been hardly a peep. The headline of an Al Jazeera article warned recently: “Gaza’s children still struggling with hunger as another famine threatens.”
Columbia University marketing professor Ran Kivetz, who tracked shipments of food into Gaza for about 16 months starting in late October 2023, using data from the UN and the Israeli government, called the IPC’s declaration of famine a “complete politicization of science.”
“No matter your politics, at some point, facts need to matter,” he said.
Last year’s famine declaration by the IPC was only the fifth such declaration it had ever made—and the first outside Africa. And it caused an explosion of rage against Israel that had been building for more than a year, including accusations that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war.
In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of the United States Agency for International Development for the Joe Biden administration, became the first U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun, even though the report she cited to Congress was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding.
On the day of the famine declaration, 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.’ ” Blaming Israel, he added, “We cannot allow this situation to continue with impunity.” A week later, UK prime minister Keir Starmer said the country would recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel took “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza.” A UN commission concluded in September that Israel had “committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” citing the imposition of “a total siege, including blocking humanitarian aid leading to starvation.”
I have always had a streak of cynicism alongside my rather sunny optimism about human potential to do great things, but the past decade has turned me into a less witty Ambrose Bierce.
I am much more inclined to see the dark side of humanity, and to expect lies to be told a significant portion of humanity to swallow them whole.
Worse, I expect that they will embrace the lies even after they have been exposed.
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