There Never Was ‘Starvation’ in Gaza

A UN commission has accused Israel of deliberately targeting and killing “Palestinian” children: “New UN inquiry: Israel ‘deliberately’ killed Palestinian children, resulting in genocide,” by Mathilda Heller and Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2026:

Other than in July-August 2025, when the IDF admitted an emergency in food insecurity, for most of the war, while food supplies were sometimes down in Gaza as compared to pre-war, there was no evidence that mass starvation ever took place….

There never was “starvation” in Gaza. During only two months — July and August 2025— was there “food insecurity,” which is a different thing. It means just that — not knowing when, and how extensive, food deliveries would be made. No one has died of starvation in Gaza. Photographs of Gaza children supposedly suffering from starvation turned out to be of children suffering from wasting diseases, including muscular dystrophy. In some cases, photos of “starving Gaza children” turned out to be children from other conflicts. Since October 7, 2023, the Israelis have facilitated the entry of 1.3 million metric tons of food aid. But the UN Report claims that Israel is trying to starve the Gazans to death.

The report claims that multiple sources of information were consulted, including thousands of open-source items and remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses.

However, it said that “where the risk of re-traumatization was high, the Commission did not contact the family [of children] directly but relied on information already collected by independent national and international organizations as well as open-source published photographs and videos assessed as ‘credible’ and used for the purposes of analysis and corroboration.”…

The commission nowhere names the sources it relied on. Why not? Was it afraid those sources would be immediately identified as virulently anti-Israel groups or individuals, such as the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the antisemitic Francesca Albanese? And Hamas provided the numbers of casualties in Gaza, that always lumps both combatant and civilian deaths together. The Israelis have done their level best to disentangle those numbers, but the commission did not bother to listen to what the Israelis had to say.

The framing of many of the case studies is also noteworthy.

For example, the report spoke of an incident on November 29, 2025, when two brothers, aged 10 and nine, were killed in an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila, east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

The boys were said to be “gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred.”

Israeli security forces stated that soldiers spotted two suspects crossing the yellow line, acting suspiciously and approaching their forces, so a drone eliminated the “immediate threat.”

The report then writes that “the soldiers should not have classified the boys as ‘suspects’ in the first place since they were clearly involved only in collecting firewood.

By maintaining that the children killed were ‘suspects,’ the Israeli security forces have deflected responsibility to Palestinian children, portraying them as terrorists rather than casualties….

But they were “suspects” in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were approaching the Yellow Line, which Gazans had been told not to cross. If two figures were seen approaching the line, and making as if to cross it, it was possible, in the fog of war, of the IDF soldiers to assume these were member of Hamas trying to infiltrate behind IDF lines. The fact that the IDF was mistaken — a horrible mistake — does not mean they were “deliberately” seeking out children to kill. Misidentification is not premeditated murder.

The commission report insists that “such tactics by the Israeli security forces serve to distort the factual narrative and further marginalize affected children and their families.”

The IDF was not trying to kill children. But 16-, 17-, 18-year old boys, armed like any adult Hamas member with a rifle, can be mortal threats every bit as dangerous as those combatants who are a few years older. The commission insists they be classified as “children.” But armed with an AK-47 and just as physically capable as their elders in the Hamas terror group, they should be considered to be adults. Besides, how in the heat of urban battles, can IDF soldiers be expected to know the exact ages of those who are shooting at them? It’s preposterous.

“Children reported facing extremely abusive treatment when arriving at military detention facilities, including being forced to make confessions, being forced to strip to their underwear in front of others, being blindfolded and handcuffed while forced to kneel on gravel or asphalt, being beaten with weapons and kicked in the head and other body parts, and being terrorized by dogs.”…

Is it just possible that these stories are made up? Do we have any reason to think that the IDF, in the nearly 80 years of its existence, has ever treated children this way? And why are the children who, the Commission claims, to have suffered thus — those kicks in the head, those snarling attack dogs — not being identified so that the IDF can interrogate them? Wild charges are being made against Israel, but the Israelis were never consulted, never allowed to present their version of events or to cross-question their young accusers.