Predictions about an impending famine in Gaza, or about the IDF’s mass-murder of Gazan civilians, have proved to be untrue, but too many people continue to believe the initial sensationalist predictions and pay no heed to the subsequent correction. More on this state of affairs can be found here: “Predictions of Gaza’s death toll were wrong – why is no one being held accountable? – opinion,” by Micha Danzig, Jerusalem Post, October 17, 2026:
In late September, Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry published its 2025 mortality report, the first since the war began to purport to count every death in Gaza.
Of 24,650 deaths, it attributed 17,286 to “war operations,” without separating combatants from civilians, and 1,584 to accidents. Independent analyst Eirik Schrøder-Bråtane calculated that the remaining 5,780 nonviolent deaths roughly matched Gaza’s prewar annual nonviolent toll. The ministry also recorded 50,227 births.
This was 2025: the year Israel halted aid for 11 weeks after Hamas refused to extend the truce and release more hostages, following a six-week ceasefire during which 25,200 trucks delivered nearly 450,000 tons of aid. Israel said Hamas was seizing and selling supplies to finance its war. By September, Israel counted over two million tons delivered during the war.
It was also the year UN officials warned of babies dying by the thousands and the IPC, the UN-backed hunger monitor, declared famine in Gaza City.
Yet the ministry’s own figures show nothing resembling the mass-mortality footprint those warnings suggested: no surge in nonviolent deaths from hunger, disease, or other indirect causes….
For years, Israel’s accusers have issued confident predictions of mass death and confident counts of massacres. The headlines circle the globe. When the predictions fail, or the numbers collapse, the correction barely travels at all.
On May 20, 2025, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told BBC Radio 4 that 14,000 babies in Gaza “will die in the next 48 hours” unless aid reached them. Within a day, the UN clarified that the figure meant roughly 14,100 projected cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children under age 5.
Not deaths. Not babies. Not 48 hours.
The report does show deterioration: infant mortality of 15.8 per 1,000 live births and under-five mortality of 33.4, both worse than before the war. But in the year of the UN’s warnings, Gaza’s infant mortality roughly matched Egypt’s peacetime rate of 16.1, and both its rates sat below the global average. Worse, yes. Mass death, no.
In February 2024, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Johns Hopkins projected as many as 85,750 excess deaths in Gaza over six months in a worst-case scenario of escalating war and epidemic disease. Activist outlets ran headlines like “Israel Could Kill 85,000 More Gazans in 6 Months,” and a lead author told US news program Democracy Now! that the escalation scenario was “currently what’s happening in Rafah.” That epidemic never came….
There have now been more than three years of war, and the total number of deaths in Gaza never reached “85,750” excess deaths in “the next six months,” as those researchers predicted in February 2024. In fact, over the past three years, the total death toll in Gaza has come to 74,000, with 25,000 of them being Hamas fighters and — based on historical data — another 24,000 deaths (8,000 each year) attributable to accidents and disease. In addition, an estimated 3,000 Gazans were killed as a result of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza. In just one such case, a PIJ rocket landed in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli hospital, killing hundreds of Gazan civilians.
In March 2024, the IPC projected famine in northern Gaza by the end of May if fighting and severe aid restrictions continued. By June, its own Famine Review Committee found the evidence did not indicate famine….
During the last three years of war, there has never been famine in Gaza. Yet most of the world has heard the word “famine,” and that has remained lodged in the collective brain, despite UNICEF’s own acknowledgement that “there was no famine in Gaza.”
In the first two years of war, out of 2.1 million people in Gaza, only 455 — according to Hamas itself — died of malnutrition. Does that sound like “famine” to you?
Rafah followed a familiar pattern. Before Israel entered the city in May 2024, the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry warned an assault would bring “the annihilation of about 1.5 million Palestinians.”…
The EU’s then-foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, scoffed at evacuating civilians: “Where? To the moon?” Within three weeks, about a million people had evacuated Rafah. There was no annihilation and no apology.
These wild exaggerations of Palestinian deaths did not begin with the current war. They were apparent in 2002, and again in 2009, during Operation Cast Lead.
On October 17, 2023, Hamas’s health authorities instantly blamed Israel for the Ahli hospital explosion and reported nearly 500 dead. American, British, French, and Canadian intelligence assessments concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the likely cause; US intelligence put the toll at a fraction of the ministry’s tally. The New York Times later conceded that its early coverage had relied too heavily on Hamas’s claims.
Four foreign intelligence services, in addition to the IDF, positively identified the rocket that landed in the parking lot of al-Ahli hospital as having been misfired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the number of dead turned out to be 271, not 500, as Hamas had claimed.
Time after time, these claims of impending catastrophe in Gaza — famines, mass deaths from IDF operations —have proven to be wildly exaggerated or outright falsehoods. Yet those who make these predictions are never called to account, and continue in their attribution of atrocities to the much-maligned IDF, that makes tremendous efforts, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, and making millions of robocalls, to warn civilians away from sites about to be targeted.
The world’s media carry the claims about IDF-caused famines and huge civilian death tolls from IDF guns and bombs, and impress them upon the collective consciousness. When, later, these claims have been shown to be false, the later correction is largely ignored; the original charges stick. These calumnies will continue to be accepted until the government of Israel mounts a sustained campaign of information equal in effect to what its military has achieved.
Leave a Reply