In August 2025, for the first time in its 20 year history, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classified Gaza as having reached phase 5, the most acute phase in its system. This classification meant that Gaza was deep into a famine, and many of the starving have already suffered irreversible damage.
The IPC locates Gaza City as being fully within phase 5. The same level of food scarcity is expected to reach Deir al Balah and Khan Younis by late September.
Never before has the IPC made a full phase 5 famine classification outside Africa. It had certainly never reached this classification for a location that was just a few kilometres from world class restaurants. As UN Under-Secretary General Tom Fetcher put it in a memorable speech, the Gaza famine is taking place “within a few hundred meters of food, within a fertile land.”
The Gaza famine has been engineered in a manner that is without precedent in world history. People have described Israel’s siege as medieval, but the famine is backed by the full force of modern technology. Rather than looking to early history for analogies, what is happening in Gaza is best understood as a grotesquely futuristic iteration of modern biopolitics.
“Pre-existing conditions”
Within days of report’s release, Israel immediately called for its retraction. There is nothing unusual about a state that has created a famine pulling all the levers at its disposal to deny it. What makes Israel different from the average perpetrator is the eagerness of US and European media outlets to spread the perpetrator’s denialist narrative.
Already in July, the groundwork had been laid in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, which ran a “correction” to the caption it provided on an image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child dying of starvation in Gaza. When the cover image of his emaciated body was used for the story on Gazans dying of starvation, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which controls the entry of food and medicine into Gaza, informed the Times that al-Mutawaq was born with cerebral palsy.
Israeli media, including I24 and The Jerusalem Post set to work spreading this misinformation and suggesting that vulnerable individuals dying of starvation could not be treated as evidence of a famine.
Soon after, the Times stated that al-Mutawaq had “pre-existing health problems.” But they failed to disclose is that this “correction” was made in response to Israeli pressure and that all famines target the vulnerable first. While cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition, it is not typically fatal for young children absent conditions of siege and famine. Had the victims of starvation not been Palestinian, common sense would have prevailed. No one would have found it necessary to make the obvious point that death by starvation combined with co-morbidities is still death by starvation.
Other media outlets soon followed, adjusting their captions to reflect, even in the abstract and untethered from specific cases, the possibility that children dying of starvation were suffering from “preexisting conditions.”
The Associated Press captioned the images on a photo essay by Palestinian photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi documenting how starvation is attacking children’s bodies with the following disclaimer: “In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation, largely the result of the ongoing war.”
Perhaps the Associated Press thought that they were mitigating the harm done by such captions by acknowledging that these so-called “preexisting conditions” that Israel and its defenders are using to deny evidence of famine are in fact “the result of the ongoing war.” But they should not be excused so easily for their complicity in famine denial.
The “pre-existing conditions” discourse has a dark history in the US, where it was introduced during the 1940s to deny healthcare to ailing patients. Even more ominously in Gaza, the “pre-existing conditions” that the media uses to whitewash famine are themselves the direct result of two decades of siege.
Legitimising Israel’s narratives
The right-wing US media company Free Press further disseminated the Israeli narrative when it published a story claiming that the “symbols of Gazan starvation […] suffer from other health problems.” Once again, ableism was used to deny the Gaza famine.
If the sick were made sicker by Israel’s engineered famine, it was implied that it was their own fault, and Israel could not be blamed for Gaza’s starvation. Yet the “preexisting conditions” cited by the Free Press journalists—rickets and cystic fibrosis—are not typically fatal for young children.
The fact that children in Gaza afflicted with these diseases are at a much higher risk of imminent death only confirms the severity of the famine, as well as its wider impact on conditions of life and mortality rates. Yet some media outlets downplayed the famine by focusing on the medical challenges faced by children who are dying of starvation.
On the very day the IPC released its famine report, CNN redacted its own story on starvation in Gaza by “updating” its captions to “reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.”
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—himself a war criminal whom the International Criminal Court has indicted with “crimes of starvation,” marking the first time it had ever charged any leader with that crime—endorsed the Free Press story. He did not acknowledge all that his own government had done to undermine accurate reporting and to block data collection on starvation in Gaza.
The Gaza famine is an atrocity, a war crime, and evidence for genocide not just because it leads to deaths from starvation. No less fundamentally, it contributes to the breakdown of a social order. Famine tears communities apart. Mothers are forced to watch their children starve, and children watch their parents risk their lives—sometimes getting shot and killed—while searching for food to keep them alive.
Having normalised famine denialism through a eugenicist discourse in July, Israel was well-prepared to escalate its information warfare when the IPC issued its landmark report in August.
Israel attacked the report on two fronts. First, by falsely claiming that the data was biased. Second, by smearing the report authors due to their alleged political biases. As for the data-related dispute, the official X account for the state of Israel falsely insisted that the IPC had “forged” a famine by lowering the threshold to 15% malnutrition among the general population, as measured by upper-arm circumference. Yet the 15% malnutrition standard, measured according to upper arm circumference, was also relied on for previous IPC reports for other locations that reached a phase 5 famine assessment, including Sudan in 2024 and South Sudan in 2020.
As Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International concludes, Israel’s misrepresentation “is not a good-faith misread. It is a campaign of concerted disinfo[rmation].” The IPC quickly refuted Israel’s false claims.
Denialism
Food security experts criticise the IPC for being too conservative in its metrics. The general consensus is that the IPC places the bar for phase 5 famine classification too high. By the time famine is assessed by the IPC, mortality rates will have sharply escalated (as happened in Gaza during the second half of July 2025), and for many of those who are starving it will be too late to save them.
Unlike most European countries, the US did not issue any official response to the IPC famine report. On 27 August, during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council which had been convened to address the famine in Gaza, US Ambassador Dorothy Shea to the UN rejected the report by alleging that one of the authors was biased against Israel. Shea’s critique was based on guilt-by-association and did not engage with the substance of the report’s claims.
The US’s denialist stance was explicitly rejected by all other 14 of the 15 Security Council members, who issued a statement affirming that they “trust the IPC’s work and methodology.” However, this consensus will be meaningless unless further measures are taken in defiance of the US.
Indeed, denialism is a core feature of Israel’s information war and is one reason why the genocide persists. In October 2023, less than three weeks into the Gaza genocide, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he doubted the veracity of the casualty reports provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In a classic case of denying Palestinians the right to narrate their own extermination, he said “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
These same reports that Biden cast doubt on had been deemed reliable by the United Nations, human rights groups, and mainstream—even the Israeli—media, not to mention Biden’s own State Department.
It was the first time a US President cast doubt on the validity of the figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Subsequent reporting and scholarship has shown that the Ministry of Health’s numbers are likely to be a drastic undercount; importantly, they don’t include indirect deaths from Palestinians who died due to lack of food, water, medicine, and medical care. Yet, mainstream US media started to refer to Gaza’s Ministry of Health as “Hamas-run” in order to undermine the source.
Around the same time, Israel launched a campaign questioning the casualty figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN uncritically absorbed Israel’s messaging and began attaching “Hamas-run” to every reference to casualty figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
For no other nation does the media find it necessary to preface every reference to a civilian agency with the name of the political faction governing that country. Civilian agencies ought to be respected for the work they do, wherever they happen to be located.
Ending impunity, sanctions now
The crime of famine often converges in practice with the crime of genocide. For this reason, both kind of denialist narratives often flourish together. Just as complicity in genocide is a crime under international law, so should complicity in famine bring criminal sanctions.
In the first days of September 2025, as the famine and mass murder of civilians in Gaza continued to spiral out of control, Belgium announced that it would formally sanction Israel. The following day, Scotland announced similar measures. The majority of European states have maintained full complicity in this genocide, but the impunity that has been granted to Israel for decades is finally beginning to fray.
Famine expert Alex de Waal has compared famine to torture at the societal level. Systematic forced starvation creates a system in which “the biological imperative of survival turns against every impulse that makes us humans—compassion, solidarity, and love.”
The people of Gaza have pooled all their resources to resist this stage of social breakdown. That they have been able to withstand the pressures of famine for so long attests to the strong social and familial bonds that pre-existed the genocide.
However, no community can survive intact when their starvation becomes so acute that their bodies begin to consume themselves. Mass death by starvation awaits the people of Gaza unless we take action to stop the blockade and force Israel to open its borders and let aid flood Gaza.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and The Nation and her writing has been translated into eleven languages
Follow Rebecca on Blue Sky @rrgould and subscribe to her Substack.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.