WHO Representative to Israel Michel Thieren Pulls Back the Curtain on Anti-Israel Animus at NGOs

Michel Thieren is the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Israel. He was present at high-level meetings in Geneva with representatives of other NGOs, where anti-Israel plans were laid, to accuse Israel of “famine” long before there was even any malnutrition. Now he has pulled back the curtain on what he saw and heard at those meetings — a deep malevolence directed at the Jewish state. More on his revelations can be found here: “WHO discussed use of term ‘famine’ to pressure Israel in December 2023, doctor reveals,” Jerusalem Post, October 27, 2025:

Just two months after October 7, international organizations were already discussing how to apply the term “famine” to the situation in Gaza.

This was revealed by World Health Organization representative to Israel, Dr. Michel Thieren, on the Mosaïque podcast last week.

The podcast was created by Akadem and the French Institute of Israel, and former journalist Antoine Mercier hosted the episode.

Thieren attended a multilateral governance meeting about Gaza in Geneva in December 2023. During the meeting, Thieren said organizations discussed how important it would be to scientifically demonstrate the occurrence of a famine in Gaza, and how to use the term for communication and political pressure on Israel. According to him, this was explicitly discussed at the highest levels in these meetings.

There was no famine in Gaza in December 2023. But in December 2023, many NGOs were prepared to describe the situation in the Strip as one of “famine,” and talked over how they should use the term, what kind of evidence they could concoct to justify that use, and how to most effectively deploy the charge of “famine” as a way to pressure Israel to stop its fighting against Hamas.

“At the very end of the meeting – I won’t say exactly where, and it wasn’t necessarily at the WHO, rest assured – there was a gathering of experts who asked the question quite forcefully. I was there, and I was absolutely stunned. What they were saying, essentially, was that one should try to find a term that could be used to exert pressure. So yes, I was very shocked by that.”

Thieren added that what shocked him the most was that, in these circles, the perpetrators and the victims were designated from the very beginning, “from October 8.”…

In other words the Hamas atrocities — the rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders — that started the Gaza War, would no longer be part of the narrative. Instead, that narrative would begin with the IDF attack, while the reason for that attack disappeared into the background.

The issue with the narrative around Israel and Israel’s actions is “not only that it’s biased, but that there is often a kind of enjoyment,” he said. “There’s a kind of… we describe, we announce, we tell the story of this war with a certain pleasure….

Yes, the pleasure of blaming the Jewish state for things it has not done, the pleasure of seeing Jews vilified, the pleasure of pulling them down, portrayed as moral monsters before a world too ready to believe the worst. What could be more fun than this virtuous version of antisemitism?

And regarding October 7, Thieren says:

“There’s this desire to say ‘yes, but there’s context.’ No, there is no context [to October 7]. There is no possible context for Hamas’s murder. It is absolutely impossible.”

The context that antisemites who wanted to justify Hamas’ attacks are referring to are the years of “occupation” (forgetting that Israel pulled entirely out of Gaza in 2005), the years of supposed suffering under the knout of that colonial-settler state of Israel, the context which not only explains, but is meant to justify, the rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders that took place on October 7.

Michel Thieren has pulled back the veil, to expose the dirty little secret that so many of these virtue-signaling NGOs have on their staffs so many people determined to vilify the Jewish state.

He saw, from the inside, how these organizations were ready with their calumny, after only two months of the Gaza war describing a “famine” in the Strip, when there was not even malnutrition. The “famine” charge, repeated endlessly, became the received wisdom. So did that other false charge flung at Israel, that is now embedded in brains worldwide, of ”genocide.” Michel Thieren saw this deliberate campaign of vilification up close, and now he has chosen to speak out. He deserves to be heard beyond a single podcast. Who will invite him to discuss before Congress the plans that were hatched by several NGOs to vilify the Jewish state? Or who will invite him to appear on a television news program for an even wider audience?