Famine in Gaza?

[GeneralMacArthur]

For a couple months now, we've been hearing that a famine in Gaza is "impending" or "imminent" or that Gaza is "teetering on the verge" of famine or some variation of this.

We have also seen the Biden Administration / liberal consensus, which tries to appease the base without abandoning Israel, become "Israel should defeat Hamas, but they've handled the war terribly and in particular they need to do way better on aid and let way more aid in."

I've also noticed that the "Genocide Joe" crowd have switched their claim from:
"Israel is committing a genocide by slaughtering Palestinians en masse"
to
"Israel is committing a genocide by starving the Palestinians to death"
largely because, as I have noted elsewhere, there has been a sharp decline in Gaza deaths, to the point where as of March 28 the number is about 32,000 but it passed 30,000 in February, so we are now averaging well below 100 deaths/day, whereas at the beginning of the conflict it was close to 500/day.  This is putting aside the fact that the methodology for counting/reporting deaths has changed as the war has progressed and now most death counts are based on hearsay rather than actual casualty reports.

All of this begs the question, is there actually an aid crisis / impending famine in Gaza?

Now as I wrote a week ago, the most reliable poll we have from Gaza shows that 96% of Palestinians have access to food/water.  But this didn't convince many people, because it's just a poll -- that's soft data, anyone can dismiss it by just deciding the methodology must have been wrong.  That is after all Atlas's favorite habit.

I've long said that I would like more hard data from this war, and today I discovered that hard data on aid does exist -- from, of all sources, the UNRWA.  Today, for instance, 206 trucks of aid entered Gaza.

I was going to do the math on this, but a Reddit post beat me to it, so I will summarize here.

The UNWRA source above says 11944/17839 trucks that have gone into Gaza have been food trucks, or about 67%.

The United Nations says that every food truck is 20 tons of food.

Let's say Gaza is getting around 200 trucks per day, 67% of them being 20-ton food trucks.  So that is (200 * 20 * 0.67) = 2,680 tons of food per day.  The most recent estimated population of the Gaza Strip was 2,375,259 people.  So that averages out to (2,000 * 2,680 / 2,375,259) = 2.25lbs of food aid per person per day.

Is that enough?  Well, we have to take a closer look at what the food is.  The World Food Programme breaks it down into 32% flour, 21% frozen meat as the top two items.  Let's say that's 0.72lbs flour, 0.5lbs meat per person.  I asked Google for some calculations and got that this is about 1,200 calories of flour and about 250 calories of meat (I put in lamb).  So even at only half of the aid accounted for, we're already at nearly 1,500 calories per person.

What to make of this?

Well, you guys probably know what I'm going to say.  The narrative that Israel is starving the Palestinians is totally false, and the narrative that Israel needs to "do more to get aid into Gaza" is just a cheap shot people are using so they can criticize Israel without criticizing the war on Hamas.  These work because nobody is actually looking at the facts.  If you do look at the facts and do the math, based on figures provided by the U.N. itself, you see that actually, at its current rate, Israel is providing a sufficient amount of food to the Gazans.

Which makes sense, because we've been hearing for months now that Gaza will enter famine any day now, yet the Gazans themselves report that they're fine on food/water access, and every piece of footage we see of Gaza backs this up as the Gazans don't ever seem malnourished.

It's all well and good to lie about Israel/Gaza.  I mean, we all hate Israel, what's a few lies here and there if it's all for a good cause?  Certainly Israel is no stranger to lying.

But as a popular TV show from the Trump administration put it... every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, and inevitably, that debt is paid.  Lying about Israel having a diabolical plan to intentionally starve the Gazans creates the false impression that Israel is culpable in a Holodomor-style genocide, when Israel is not.  This is our debt to the truth.  And it will be paid in November, when millions of young people talk each other out of voting for Joe Biden because they were fooled by our lies into believing that he allowed a genocide to take place, resulting in the return to office of President Donald J. Trump.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I would say it very much depends on the area. Some parts of Gaza will be far better off than others. There is an awful lot of the place where there is no real news of what is going on.

Which place in Gaza do you think is specifically not getting enough food?  The math demonstrates that if food were distributed evenly, every Gazan would have sufficient food based solely on aid and nothing else.

If some Gazans aren't getting enough food, that would imply other Gazans are hoarding more food than they need...... hmmmm..... wonder which group that might be.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Starving baby Israel's fault

The well-groomed, well-fed Palestinian doctor with the dashing high fade says it's because there's no formula milk.  Why is the World Food Programme, which organizes the food trucks, not giving them formula milk?  Is the WFP committing genocide?

This is really disingenuous and disgusting

I did get the organization wrong.  WFP is not handling baby formula.  That's being handled by UNICEF.  And Israel is not preventing them from delivering formula to Gaza.

The Israeli government says that 530 tons of baby formula have been delivered since the start of the war.  I know everyone reading this will immediately jump to saying "lol you're gonna believe Israel?" and the answer is yes, because nobody has provided any reason to believe this isn't true other than a generic "Israel lies", and because it aligns with the aid numbers that have been reported by UNICEF itself and aligns with the other aid delivered.

https://twitter.com/cogatonline/status/1770723088608497740?s=20

530 tons is about 1 million pounds.  The average baby needs 1.5oz of formula every 3 hours, or 12oz per day, which is 0.75 lbs.  The U.N. says there are 20,000 babies in Gaza.  That's 15,000lbs of formula needed per day.  1,000,000lbs is enough to last about two months.  So I would say it isn't enough -- if all the babies were on formula.  But you can breastfeed as well.  I have no idea what the ratio of breastfed:formula babies in Gaza is, so that would determine whether or not the formula has been sufficient.  For instance if it was 50:50, so only 10,000 babies in Gaza need formula, then there has been enough supplied to last four months.

At any rate, there isn't such a severe formula deficiency that it would cause the degree of malnutrition seen in the video.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/gaza-hunger-figures-worst-record-says-oxfam

Once again, the report only says "famine is imminent in Northern Gaza."  These various U.N. agencies and NGOs have been crying wolf about this for months.

Here's an article by Human Rights Watch.  Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza.

On November 17, the WFP warned of the “immediate possibility” of starvation, highlighting that supplies of food and water were practically non-existent. On December 3, it reported a “high risk of famine,” indicating that Gaza’s food system was on the brink of collapse. And on December 6, it declared that 48 percent of households in northern Gaza and 38 percent of displaced people in southern Gaza had experienced “severe levels of hunger.”

wait, hold up, what were those dates again?  November 17?  December 3?  December 6?  Gaza was "on the brink of collapse" and experiencing "severe levels of hunger" and supplies of food were "non-existent" and starvation was "immediate" more than four months ago?

Seriously, doesn't anyone else see any red flags with all this stuff?  This isn't an isolated example, we've been getting reports every week since the invasion started issuing similar dire warnings that widespread famine and death is just around the corner in Gaza... and then another couple weeks go by without it happening.

Meanwhile it's always accompanied by condemnations of Israel and allegations of "using starvation as a weapon of war", like this one from the Oxfam report:

Oxfam’s report today shows how Israel is causing these horrifying figures, by deliberately blocking food and aid from going into Gaza. It has been using starvation as a weapon of war for over five months now. The humanitarian situation in Gaza has actually worsened since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) specifically ordered Israel to enable more aid.  Israel’s deliberate manufacturing of suffering is systemic and of such scale and intensity that it creates a real risk of a genocide in Gaza.

I specifically want to highlight the part about Israel deliberately sending less aid after the ICJ "ordered" (lol) Israel to enable more aid.

Let's look at the actual facts -- the UNRWA's own data.  Here we go again.

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTVkYmEwNmMtZWYxNy00ODhlLWI2ZjctNjIzMzQ5OGQxNzY5IiwidCI6IjI2MmY2YTQxLTIwZTktNDE0MC04ZDNlLWZkZjVlZWNiNDE1NyIsImMiOjl9&pageName=ReportSection3306863add46319dc574

back in December, the Kerem Shalom border crossing was closed and all aid went through Rafah.  So Gazans were getting about 100 trucks per day.  Starting in January the Kerem Shalom crossing opened and aid has increased to 150-200 trucks per day.  This is the UNRWA's own data, saying that aid has nearly doubled since December. 

[GeneralMacArthur]

Starving baby Israel's fault

The well-groomed, well-fed Palestinian doctor with the dashing high fade says it's because there's no formula milk.  Why is the World Food Programme, which organizes the food trucks, not giving them formula milk?  Is the WFP committing genocide?

This is really disingenuous and disgusting

530 tons is about 1 million pounds.  The average baby needs 1.5oz of formula every 3 hours, or 12oz per day, which is 0.75 lbs.  The U.N. says there are 20,000 babies in Gaza.  That's 15,000lbs of formula needed per day.  1,000,000lbs is enough to last about two months.  So I would say it isn't enough -- if all the babies were on formula.  But you can breastfeed as well.  I have no idea what the ratio of breastfed:formula babies in Gaza is, so that would determine whether or not the formula has been sufficient.  For instance if it was 50:50, so only 10,000 babies in Gaza need formula, then there has been enough supplied to last four months.

At any rate, there isn't such a severe formula deficiency that it would cause the degree of malnutrition seen in the video.

Define 'baby' because that's probably not what the U.N said.

This is what the U.N (UNICEF) said:
GENEVA, 19 January 2024 – “In the 105 days of this escalation in the Gaza Strip, nearly 20,000 babies have been born into war. That's a baby born into this horrendous war every 10 minutes.

So, is a person no longer a 'baby' after 3 1/2 months?

In British Columbia, the advice is to use baby formula for 9-12 months, which is considerably longer than 3 1/2 months.

Half of the population of Gaza is under 18, so hat there would be just 20,000 babies is absurd.

My bad, I didn't know babies needed formula for that long I thought they only needed it for at most the first six months or so.

In that case, again it depends on the breastfeed:formula ratio, but it's likely that the formula being provided is insufficient and UNICEF should organize more.  The deficiency would not be so severe that it would result in the kind of starvation we're seeing in the video, though.

And again, it's not like there's a mile of baby formula trucks backed up at the border waiting to get through, or Israeli soldiers going through aid trucks and taking the baby formula out so they can starve the babies, which is what people are implying when they say Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Famine and starvation are not the same as death. Not babies obviously, but a severely malnutritioned adult can survive for 2-3 months with water but no food.

Think of concentration camp survivors.

There is some aid getting in and their is subsistence food growing wild in some parts of Gaza.

The numbers of deaths will ramp up very quickly if this situation persists, which is a very ghoulish thing to argue about.

This is why pro-Israel people keep talking about how fine the Gazans look though.  I've seen videos that feature plenty of overweight Gazans.  I'm certainly not a fan of the kinds of rude comments I've seen pro-Israel people making about the weight of Palestinian women, but the point stands that they certainly don't look like the concentration camp survivors who actually experienced starvation.

I mean this is what I was saying when I talked about the doctor before.  This guy doesn't look like a concentration camp victim.  He looks to be in good health and even has the time and resources to get a nice shave and high fade.  I mean more power to him, he's a good looking dude and he's doing God's work in that hospital.  But they didn't have American Crew Men's Hair Fiber in Auschwitz.  It undercuts the comparison.  Which in turn undercuts the entire argument about intentional mass famine, which would be a genocide.

This article from The Economist contains the following claims.

1. "The UN says Israel routinely denies approval for aid convoys. Earlier this month it bombed a food-distribution centre. Israeli forces occupy most of the farmland."

4. "[In Gaza city] only a small handful of supply convoys have been allowed in."

The U.N. also says that 200 trucks per day are getting through, the majority of which are in Northern Gaza, which as my original post demonstrates, is sufficient to adequately feed every single Gazan.

2. "Increasingly there are areas [in Gaza] where local crime families have stolen the little food brought in and are selling it for profit."

what would you like Israel to do about this, start shooting gangsters who disguise themselves as Palestinian civilians and steal the aid from food trucks?  We all know what the headlines would be.

This is one area I think we do both agree that Israel should be doing better.  Israel should crack down harder on criminal gangs in Northern Gaza who are stealing food, many of which I would guess are allied with Hamas.  In fact, I think if Israel finds which houses are being used as headquarters for those gangs, or finds underground shelters where they're storing weapons, they should hit them with airstrikes!  But we both know the international community's tolerance for further destruction and bloodshed in Gaza City.  Instead, Israel will be expected to combat criminal gang activity without engaging in combat.  And every single gangster they shoot will be posthumously rebranded as a civilian.

3. "Data the IPC has gathered indicate that in February 29% of children under the age of two in northern Gaza were suffering from acute malnutrition. Some 66% of families there went without any food for 24 hours at least ten times last month."

I would like to see the data and methodology for this because there is no reason 66% of families should be going without food for 24 hours when there is copious food available.

5. "Israel claims its war is to destroy Hamas', not the civilian population, and has denied that it is intentionally starving Gaza. But some senior Israeli politicians have called for exactly that and security officials have admitted that withholding supplies is 'a lever of pressure on Hamas to release Israeli hostages'."

this thread is about the reality of what's actually happening in Gaza, not the polemic of some wingnut Israeli politicians.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I have no idea what videos you are referring to but there is a period during starvation that can cause bloating and that may be what is occurring.

Why does malnutrition cause stomach bloating? Kwashiorkor is a form of acute malnutrition that occurs due to protein deficiency. It can cause swelling, loss of appetite, lack of muscle and fat tissues, and more. Kwashiorkor is a serious condition that can happen when a person does not consume enough protein.

https://borgenproject.org/malnourished-people-bloated-stomachs/

That's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about social media posts I've seen where pro-Israel people freeze-frame videos of Gazans and highlight obviously overweight women and mock them for being fat during a period of alleged famine -- you are on the internet so I'm sure you can imagine the comments written.

Like I think that's a pretty nasty, wretched thing to do.

But I also think it's wretched to act like the conditions in Gaza are equitable to Auschwitz or Dachau or any of the other concentration camps that the grandparents of the Israelis endured.  So I do get the point being made.

On the one hand you have people claiming the conditions in Gaza are similar to Auschwitz, where Jews were kept on 400 calorie/day rations and reduced to skeletons with bloated bellies, gaunt faces, loose skin and bones.  On the other hand you have videos of reality on the ground where people look absolutely nothing like that and in fact are perfectly healthy.  There's a clear contradiction between the two.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I would have no way to prove the veracity of these videos.

One thing I always find interesting during global conflicts is to go on SnapChat and look at the Snap Map hotspot to see what people are posting from some particular area of the world.  It's been annoying during this war because there are so many snaps in English that are either propaganda against a blank background, or sad face girl selfies with CashApp/Telegram requests (I'm starving can you please send me money CashApp in profile).  You have to flip through anything with English text to get to the snaps in Arabic that are actually for the local audience.

Right now go do this and come back and let me know whether the Gazans look like starving concentration camp survivors or just perfectly normal people.  I specifically didn't look before posting this because hey maybe I'm wrong and one of the first videos will be a bunch of starving people.

[GeneralMacArthur]

the polemic of some wingnut Israeli politicians.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit party

These aren't "random wingnuts." They are wingnuts in positions of power.

yes, but they are wingnuts.  Even your own article calls them "ultranationalist" and "extreme right" (and oh, god, here we go again with people acting like Itamar Ben-Gvir is somehow representative of Israel when his position is literally a glorified police chief post that was renamed specially for him to satisfy his ego).  It's a real shame that Bibi chose to staff his cabinet with these morons, but you can not come to me when I'm saying "reality is X based on all these facts and this evidence" and say "the psychos in Bibi's cabinet say it's Y" and expect me to go, oh well I must be wrong and it's actually Y.  Like obviously I'm going to pick the cold, hard evidence available to me over the ravings of Itamar f--king Ben-Gvir.

The rest of your points come down to assuming that because the food exists somewhere in Gaza, it's getting to the people who need it. That's like taking a dump on the bathroom floor and calling yourself toilet-trained.

OK, but just to be clear we've moved on from "Israel is intentionally starving the Gazan people and denying them the aid they need" to "the aid is getting into Gaza but it is not being distributed proportionately to get to the people who need it", right?  Like, you agree that the raw volume of aid Israel is allowing into Gaza would be sufficient if it was actually getting to the Gazans, right?  I am happy to discuss the logistics of aid distribution and the many problems in this domain, and I totally agree with you on this point and think there's a lot of really interesting things we could talk about here, but just want to be clear about this because that was the original point of my post, to counteract the myriad claims being made about Israel intentionally starving the Palestinians by choking them of aid.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I suspect the word game being played here is that Gaza would be in a state of famine if the aid stopped.

Of course, this was true before the war as well.  Gaza has always been totally dependent on Israel for literally everything while also viciously determined to literally bite the hand that feeds it.

But yes, most of the Palestinians living in the horrendously overpopulated Gaza Strip don't have access to food and are dependent on Israel to feed them, so if Israel ever cut them off, it would be a famine.  So famine is always technically imminent, or right around the corner.

But that's not the implication people are trying to make when they say this, of course.  They're trying to make it sound like unless we do something, fast we're going to wake up next week and find that 10,000 Gazans died of starvation.

It remains absolutely bonkers to me that Israel is the villain in all this despite providing 100% of the food and medical care for an enemy state that declared a genocidal war of conquest against Israel, especially when the reason they can't just win the war immediately by cutting off the food/aid is because their enemy is a vicious, amoral terrorist group who would gladly let the entire nation starve just to put more blood on Israel's hands.

[GeneralMacArthur]

OK folks.  So on the one hand you have me taking the numbers provided by the United Nations and the truck contents ledgers from the World Food Programme and doing some basic, transparent arithmetic to figure out how well Israel is feeding Gaza.

On the other hand, you have some guy just pulling a "300 trucks" number out of his ass.

Who you gonna go with?

[GeneralMacArthur]

It remains absolutely bonkers to me that Israel is the villain in all this despite providing 100% of the food and medical care for an enemy state that declared a genocidal war of conquest against Israel, especially when the reason they can't just win the war immediately by cutting off the food/aid is because their enemy is a vicious, amoral terrorist group who would gladly let the entire nation starve just to put more blood on Israel's hands.

This is not how the laws of war work. The occupying power is explicitly responsible for ensuring that sufficient food is provided to any occupied territories:

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

Moreover, the reason why Israel couldn't win the war by cutting off all food supplies isn't because of Hamas's inhumanity, it is because YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO COMMIT WAR CRIMES.

If you are not abiding by the Geneva Conventions, you are a villain. Doesn't matter if you're fighting somebody equally villainous, you do not get a pass from the laws of war because the other side are bad people.

Yes I'm well aware and I never said Israel shouldn't.  What I said was it's wild how Israel is the bad guys for not doing it perfectly enough, while Hamas aren't the bad guys when they're the ones who do everything in their power to make life as wretched as possible for the Gazans.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This is because Hamas are not the occupying power and do not have the capacity to bring in food.

Hamas are bad guys for very many other reasons, but as the occupier of northern Gaza, Israel are responsible for what happens there.

Israel brings in food.  Hamas steals the food and keeps it from the Palestinians.  Israel sends soldiers to protect the food.  Hamas shoots the soldiers.  Palestinians try to prevent Hamas from stealing their food.  Hamas shoots the Palestinians and says Israel did it.

End result: Hamas are the heroes, Israel are the genocidal monsters.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You're right I did pull it out of my ass rather than look it up again. It's actually 500-600 trucks a day required to ensure that Gazans are minimally healthy and not merely surviving.

Ah, the 500 trucks number.  I'm honestly surprised we made it to page two of this thread without someone tossing it out.  Let's take a look at the report on what trucks were going into Gaza right before the war started.

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-update-covering-august-2023

In August, 12,076 truckloads of authorized goods entered Gaza through the Israeli and Egyptian-controlled crossings. This is 18 per cent more than the volume of goods entering in July, 36 per cent more than the monthly average in 2022, and 8 per cent more than the monthly average just before the blockade in 2007. However, Gaza's population has grown by 60 per cent since 2007, and so have their needs.
Among the goods that entered Gaza, 42 per cent were construction materials, and 22 per cent were food supplies. About 3 per cent were humanitarian aid items facilitated by international organizations, primarily food and medical supplies.

400 trucks a day, but only 25%, or 100/day, were food or humanitarian aid.  Nearly half of them were construction materials, which obviously aren't relevant to the imminent famine this thread is about.

[GeneralMacArthur]

ON THIS ISSUE I CAN NOT PICK A SIDE.. I WILL LITERALLY ROLE AROUND THE FLOOR SCREAMING... I AM SO CONFUSED AND CONFLICTED HERE.

It's fine to be conflicted just don't lurch towards some extreme.  Like obviously the fact that the issue is complex and challenging is indicative that it's not the crystal clear moral imperative that the Genocide Joe crowd is pretending it is... there's not really an equivalent on the Israel side since only the Bibi circle (universally hated on Atlas) are saying "Israel has done nothing wrong and can do whatever it likes no matter what."

The middle ground I would propose is this.  The world has an absolute moral duty to rid Palestine of Hamas.  Since no other army wants to get involved, that means they have a moral duty to allow Israel to destroy Hamas.  Israel has a moral duty to protect and aid the Palestinian people to the greatest extent possible in the course of the annihilation of Hamas.  The main topics worth discussing are (A) how best to balance those two conflicting demands when they do come into conflict, and (B) whether Israel is adequately fulfilling its duty to protect the Palestinians, and to what extent it needs to do better.

I think those are both very good conversations to have but when people come into the conversation with positions like "Israel is committing genocide" or "Israel is intentionally starving the people of Gaza to kill them", it makes it impossible to have that conversation, because clearly they're only interested in scoring points, and any concession of Israeli wrongdoing is just going to be used for point scoring, rather than advancing the conversation.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to try and actually have part (B) of that conversation.  Is Israel adequately fulfilling its duty to protect the Palestinians?  I would say they are doing an adequate job of getting sufficient food supplies across the border into Gaza, which has been the main topic of discussion as of late.  I would say they are probably not doing an adequate job of ensuring those supplies are distributed effectively, mainly because the security/logistical challenges involved in that are immense.  Ironically, airdrops are a pretty good way to tackle this problem, because they shard the food and distribute it across a wide area that makes it hard for Hamas or other goons to predict the locations and steal the food.

fwiw, Joe Biden is deeply invested in (A) -- he apparently has a bunch of ideas for how Bibi could take out Hamas in Rafah while minimizing harm to the Palestinian people.  Bibi threw a little temper tantrum and refused to hear Joe out after the U.N. abstention, but now he's changed his mind.  So we'll see what develops.  It's pretty clear that Joe Biden's influence is the primary, if not the only, reason that Hamas's strongholds in Rafah haven't already been attacked.

[GeneralMacArthur]

To meet its minimum needs, aid agencies and U.N. officials say Gaza currently requires 500 to 600 trucks a day, including humanitarian aid and the commercial supplies that were coming in before the war. That’s about four times the number of trucks getting in now.
In March there has been an uptick, with an average of 150 trucks entering Gaza each day.

We know this from your link:
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-update-covering-august-2023

In August, 392 truckloads of authorized goods exited Gaza through the Israeli and Egyptian crossings. This represents a 3 per cent decrease compared with July and is 59 per cent lower than the monthly average in 2022.

Food and aid is what's relevant to Gaza right now.

I don't care how many construction materials were coming into Gaza before the war.  I don't think Gaza needs any construction materials right now.  It would be a complete waste.

I have no idea where the U.N. is pulling that 500-600 trucks/day number from, since I found where they originally made the claim and they didn't post any sort of math to back it up.  Maybe they are just pulling it out of their ass, maybe they are trying to claim Gaza needs construction materials, maybe they are saying Gaza needs things to sell to get its economy rebooted.  After all, even your quote mentions "commercial supplies" -- commercial supplies will be important once it's time to rebuild Gaza but they are not relevant to preventing a famine, which is the current concern.

The math in my original post is quite clear.  You simply take what food is on the trucks, multiply it by the amount of food on the trucks and the number of trucks getting in per day, and divide by the number of Gazans, and it's apparent that the current rate of food trucks is sufficient to meet the daily caloric needs of Gazans.  Nobody has tried to dispute this or deny this.  Instead you are reaching for truck numbers the U.N. puts out that are not about food trucks.

The most charitable thing I could say is that you (and the U.N.) are simply conflating two entirely different things.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This is because Hamas are not the occupying power and do not have the capacity to bring in food.

Hamas are bad guys for very many other reasons, but as the occupier of northern Gaza, Israel are responsible for what happens there.

Israel brings in food.  Hamas steals the food and keeps it from the Palestinians.  Israel sends soldiers to protect the food.  Hamas shoots the soldiers.  Palestinians try to prevent Hamas from stealing their food.  Hamas shoots the Palestinians and says Israel did it.

End result: Hamas are the heroes, Israel are the genocidal monsters.

You should’ve just said this at the start instead of trying to deny an obvious humanitarian crisis.

Nobody is denying that there is a humanitarian crisis, that much is obvious.  It's a war zone, of course there's a crisis.

The question is (A) is Israel getting enough food into Gaza.

And the follow-up question is (B) if not, is it because Israel is intentionally starving the Gazans to try and kill them -- which would be a genocidal tactic.

In my original post I demonstrate that the answer to (A) is "yes", which makes (B) moot.

If Israel is giving people food and then Hamas is stealing the food from them at gunpoint, then that would make Hamas responsible for any starvation, not Israel, yes?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Your mathematical calculations, such as they were as they were loaded with assumptions, started with the premise that there were 200 trucks a day getting into Gaza which as you've now acknowledged is more like 150 a day on average.

Definitely an increase and more than I had thought, but certainly your math is filled with assumptive holes.

The last five days have been 224, 206, 193, 139, 137.  I would expect we'll get to 150-200 again today (it's 78 so far).  The Kerem Shalom crossing looks to have been closed for Shabbat the last two weeks.  Not sure what's up with that, it wasn't before.

150 is probably still enough (after all, I got to 1500 calories per Gazan at only half of the food) but 200 is better.  I hope it stays at or above 200 for most of the rest of the war.

The point is that if that happens, which is inconsistently happening currently, it is enough to say that Israel is providing sufficient food aid just in terms of raw food.  Which is contrary to the extremely popular current narrative.  I bet if you polled Americans and asked them "is the food Israel is allowed to come into Gaza sufficient to feed the Gazans" like 95% of them would say no.  But it is!  And this is a good thing!

There are no assumptions baked into this math.  All of it is based on real data provided by the United Nations and various aid agencies.  The question of "is that aid actually being distributed equitably to Gazans once it enters Gaza" is a separate question and I make no claims or assumptions about this.  I think even if Israel were to double the amount of food going in it would still have this problem, because Hamas would still be stealing all of it to then re-sell to Palestinians for cash they can then use to buy black market weapons from Jordanians to use to kill Israeli soldiers.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes, whether the food actually reaches its intended destination is one of your assumptions and the other is that the trucks average 20 tons of food. (OK, I missed the U.N Link you had on that.) So, you are correct about that. Although with the increase in the number of trucks, it isn't necessarily the case that they are as loaded as initially when very few trucks were getting through, so that is still an assumption but possibly a reasonable one.

The percentage of trucks containing food is another assumption you made, but I think that's a reasonable assumption.

Your total calculation of caloric intake based on the amount of food is also based on assumptions though.

This is a fair criticism.

My calculation of caloric intake assumes lamb is the frozen meat.  When I was in the middle east, lamb was by far the most common meat.  Chicken and beef were the other most common.  I actually have no idea where I got that 0.5lbs of lamb was only 250 calories because I just Googled "8oz lamb calories" and it came out as more than 600 calories.  The actual line item is "frozen vegetables/meat" and I assumed it was all meat since meat is way more dense than vegetables, and there is a separate line item for standalone vegetables.

I'm also assuming they can cook the flour into bread, or make it edible somehow.  Still, for this I just Googled "0.72lbs flour calories" and it comes up as around 1200.  I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that the Gazans have the means to make flour edible... all you need is a fire and some water.

Percentage of trucks containing food is direct from the UNRWA tracker.  Yesterday there were 224 trucks, 161 of them were food trucks, 11 were mixed, 3 were medical supplies.  161/224 = 71.9% food trucks, higher than my number of 66.7%.

I'm not making any claims about the distribution of food.  My point is that the amount of food getting into Gaza is sufficient, which counteracts the claim that Israel is intentionally choking off aid at all, much less doing so to try and starve Gaza or intentionally cause a famine.

I claimed that this also disproves that a famine is imminent.  A famine could still occur if the food distribution is so bad that the food doesn't actually reach Gazans to a sufficient extent to avert a famine.  I do not think we have seen this yet and I do not think we will see this.  However, I think when people talk about "imminent famine in Gaza" or whatever, they are clearly having a discussion about the amount of food they believe is entering Gaza -- since this is always paired with some attempt to blame Israel for allegedly holding up aid.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Famine in Gaza is no longer "looming" or "imminent". Famine in Gaza is underway, says the article. The window to avert catastrophe has been closed and the question now is whether tens or hundreds of thousands are going to die*.

I will add this famine is induced by those conducting a genocide campaign in Gaza. You should show some respect for the innocent victims. In case you think asking for that is "moralising crap", I'm not hoing to waste more time. Bye

* The death toll of the Gaza Genocide may reach hundreds of thousands adding famine, induced disease and massive bombing.

Hey it's a month later and I just wanted to check in on this.  A catastrophic famine leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths was "already underway" on March 30, but now it's April 26 and the death toll for the conflict has only risen by about 1,000 deaths in that time period.

Given that Gaza has a birth rate of around 27/1000 per year or 4500 births/month, even assuming it's dramatically reduced during the conflict, that would still indicate a population increase in the Gaza Strip over the last month.

It's ok if we don't know yet... I will check back in on May 28 to see if things have changed at all.

BTW 5500 trucks have entered Gaza during this time period of which 4000 were food trucks - 80,000 tons of food or about 80 lbs/food per person for the month of April.

[GeneralMacArthur]

See GenMac, regardless of whether you believe what you say due to some cognitive dissonance, stop revolving on this issue. Hundreds of thousands are starving in Gaza. Show some respect.

Thank you

This kind of low effort moralising crap which doesn’t address any of the points that have been made in this thread should not be allowed

AtorBoltox, regardless of whether you believe some points have been made in this thread, Gaza today has more people in Phase V than Somalia had at the peak of its famine. In casextou din't know what's "Phase V", you can read the article linked below.

https://www.justsecurity.org/93841/gazas-famine-is-underway/

Somalia had a population of about 6 million in 1991 (~3x the current population of the Gaza Strip) and the famine began in around December 1991 and continued through to the end of the summer of 1992, or about eight months, before it began to decline substantially in Sept-Dec thanks to U.N. aid and United-States-led military intervention.  In that eight months, 300,000 people died.  If the two are actually comparable (you're alleging that the situation in Gaza is worse than that in Somalia than at the peak of its famine) then we would expect ~100,000 deaths in Gaza due to the famine alone, over the course of eight months, or around 12,000 deaths/month due to famine.

Instead, in the month since you wrote this post, we have only recorded 1,000 deaths -- furthermore, the Gaza Health Ministry of course does not make any distinction, but given fighting is still ongoing, it's safe to assume most of these were combat deaths.

BTW -- a 72% majority of Atlas in my recent poll said that the United States should not have gone into Somalia in 1992.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I'm not going to have a back-and-forth discussion with the guy who gets his news from Jake Shields.  Any time he responds to me I am going to post tweets from the Holocaust Denier that he unironically cited as a credible source on the Israel/Gaza thread, revealing the kinds of people he subscribes to and the kinds of places he gets his information from.  Just so you guys all know who you're arguing with, or agreeing with, when you see that yellow USSR avatar.

https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/1783949869662834835

https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/1777253326192795789






I do want to point out for other readers of this thread that food trucks were entering Gaza at a rate of 150-200 per day when I made this thread (this is noted in my OP) and that 5500 trucks in a month is 183 per day.  The talking point that "Israel could have ended this all along but only changed their ways after the WCK bombing" (which I have seen repeated by many people, not just the Jake Shields acolyte) is not true.  The throughput of aid has actually remained the same -- and we have not seen the catastrophic Somalia-esque mass-casualty famine that was predicted, because as I said in the original post a month ago, the current aid is sufficient to meet the caloric needs of the Gazan population.