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.