Amnesty International said that at no point between October 2023 and early July 2024 did Israeli authorities allow adequate aid and other essential life-saving supplies to be provided in Gaza. That’s the hard fact underneath the latest round of propaganda, where state officials, lobbyists, and media operators scramble to turn a child nutrition survey into a clean bill of health for a siege that has already done its work.
The State’s Monopoly
Israel has consistently denied that it used starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, and those denials go back to its submission to the International Court of Justice in response to South Africa’s genocide case at The Hague in January 2024. Israel’s lawyers said then that “Israel has publicly stated repeatedly that there is no limit on the amount of food, water, shelter or medical supplies that can be brought into Gaza”. Human rights organisations challenged those protestations from the start. The language was polished. The blockade logic was not.
Israel imposed a total blockade spanning March to mid-May 2025, and the World Health Organization said it generated “one of the world’s worst hunger crises,” with 57 children reportedly dying of malnutrition. The WHO said that number was likely an underestimate. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2024, the allegations included “the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”. The machinery of state violence doesn’t need a press release to function. It just needs checkpoints, closures, and enough bureaucratic denial to keep the paperwork tidy.
The NGO Mirage
The latest spin campaign kicked off after the publication of a UNICEF survey addressing malnutrition in Gaza, focusing on children under the age of five. Supporters of Israel rushed to claim the study had somehow erased the record of famine. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee posted on X: “This is awkward for Israel haters. When a UN (no friend of Israel) organization … debunks the lie that Israel was ‘starving kids’ it’s worth a read. Israel genocidal? They botched it again!” Former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy added on X that “the ‘Gaza famine’ was always a hoax”, while UN Watch posted: “Gaza Famine? Not according to UNICEF. A new survey shows Gaza has one of the lowest acute child malnutrition rates in the world.” Andrew Fox, a researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, wrote on X that the notion of a famine in Gaza during Israel’s assault had been “conclusively disproven”.
But UNICEF told the authors something far less useful to the spin merchants. “The recent nutrition survey measures conditions in mid-2026, more than nine months after the IPC confirmed famine in August 2025 and after a ceasefire and substantial scale-up in humanitarian assistance. It cannot tell us what conditions were in August 2025, and it was never designed to. Both findings stand: famine was confirmed then, and acute malnutrition among children has fallen since. That improvement is a product of the assistance delivered in between, not evidence that it was unnecessary.” Medical Aid for Palestinians said: “Claims that famine never happened in Gaza are incorrect, misleading and dangerous.” It added: “Both findings can stand at the same time: famine was confirmed in Gaza by the IPC in August 2025, and the Unicef-coordinated survey shows that malnutrition among surveyed children has fallen since then. Reading the second finding as disproving the first is an abuse and misrepresentation of the data and survey findings.”
Who Gets Crushed
UNICEF found that around one in eight children under the age of five suffers from stunted growth, noting: “This points to longer-term nutritional stress and repeated deprivation beyond immediate wasting.” The WHO defines stunting as “the impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation”. It said stunting is largely irreversible and has serious long-term consequences. That’s the part no one can spin away with a triumphant post and a blue checkmark.
Martin Shaw, an emeritus professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex, said: “The effects of three years of Israeli military violence - wounding, amputation, untreated illness, bereavement, huge psychological stress, destruction of health services, schooling, etc - are all showing in the condition of the child population.” Mike Spagat, an economics professor at Royal Holloway, said: “Children’s weights can fall dramatically in a few weeks and can be brought back up in a few weeks with the right treatment - especially when it is administered by professionals, as it is here.” He added: “A wasting measurement is therefore a snapshot of conditions at a moment in time, and the moment matters. This survey was fielded in June 2026: eight months into the ceasefire, after two full quarters of feeding at scale.” Spagat concluded that the low wasting figure represents “the measured effect of a professional intervention, and Israel’s supporters are citing it as proof the intervention was never needed”.
The new UNICEF study does not touch the allegation in the ICC arrest warrant that Netanyahu used starvation as a weapon of war. It also doesn’t erase the blockade, the famine confirmation, or the dead children already counted. Nobody, whether friends or critics of Israel, should weaponise or make political capital out of the report. But the state system already has. It always does.