The narrative of starvation and famine in Gaza did not become dominant because of evidence or statistics. It became dominant because misleading numbers, repeated slogans, and emotionally effective claims, won over facts.
Article by War Detective @seekersomething
For years, selective truck figures were circulated without context. Total aid flows before the war, that most often carried construction materials, were routinely confused with actual food supply demand. United Nations (UN) statements that Gaza “needs 500–600 trucks a day to survive” were repeated across major media outlets as if they were straightforward facts, even though those figures were not based on calendar-year averages and referred to mixed cargo, most of which was not food. Much of what entered Gaza before the war also consisted of goods that had little to do with preventing starvation in wartime but that was omitted from the reporting.
From there, the pattern reinforced itself. Reports cited earlier
reports. Headlines reduced complex logistical questions to simple moral
conclusions. Activists used those claims to push narratives they already
believed. And a highly disputed allegation gradually hardened into received
truth for many.
This article is about that process.
1. Background: The food situation in Gaza before the war
1.1. The Gaza Blockade
1.2. Pre-war baseline
2. How much food entered Gaza before the war
2.1. What the trucks actually carried
2.2 Why is this important?
2.3. How to calculate the number of trucks?
2.4. How to use that number?
3. Where the confusion about how much food Gaza needs comes from
3.1. Examples when the UN has used 500-600 trucks or similar
3.2. Here are examples when the media has reported these numbers...
3.3. Later BBC corrections
4. The different situation in the war
4.1. The conditions on the ground didn't allow mass aid to enter Gaza...
4.2. How much food entered Gaza directly after the war began?
4.2.1. A closer look at the UN data from January 2024
4.2.2. A comparison to the COGAT data from January 2024
4.2.3. What does this difference mean?
4.3. What does the difference from UN and COGAT data come from
4.4. What does UN say about this difference in numbers?
4.4.1. Trends in the UN data for 2024
4.4.2. Comparisons to the COGAT data for 2024
4.5. Amnesty used UNRWA data instead of the full UN dataset...
4.5.1. Comparing UNRWA and COGAT numbers
4.5.2. What the UN data shows for the same period
4.5.3. More comparisons of UNRWA and COGAT data
4.5.4. What this means for the Amnesty International report
4.6. What does all of this mean for the public opinion?
5. How much food do Gaza need then?
5.1. What is included in the humanitarian food?
5.2. The demographic situation in Gaza
5.3. The point of all these numbers
6. The flawed reporting about the food situation continued into 2025
6.1. Aid during the ceasefire
6.2. Estimated food sufficiency during the ceasefire
6.3. Why did Israel reduce aid deliveries?
6.4. The UN warnings and public narrative
6.4.1. Warnings of limited aid and rising prices
6.4.2. The UN statement: 14,000 babies will die in 48 hours
6.5. Other media outlets followed - Article from Guardian
6.5.1. Pre-war numbers cited by the Guardian
6.5.2. The aid situation in July 2025 according to the Guardian
6.5.3. Starvation deaths according to the Guardian
7. What happened in May to July 2025?
7.1. GHF - The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
7.1.1. How Hamas needed the aid
7.1.2. GHF operations and data
7.1.3. Alleged shootings at GHF sites
7.2. Intercepted convoys, looting, and the collapse of distribution
7.3. Why UN deliveries slowed sharply in July
7.3.1. The reason why the UN delivered 15 trucks per day with food
7.3.2. That math simply doesn't add up
7.3.3. Differences between UN data and COGAT
8. Hamas responds with propaganda
8.1. Cases of starving journalists and children
8.2. What this means for the reported malnutrition deaths
9. Conclusion
1. Background: The food situation in Gaza before the war
Before going into any clarifications or new material, we first need to
establish a small baseline with background information in this topic. In 2005,
Israel withdrew
completely from Gaza and in 2006 Hamas won the elections. Then the following year, Hamas took
full control over Gaza by violently killing its opposition. After taking power in 2007, Hamas quickly began launching thousands of rockets per year at Israeli civilian areas. Israel and Egypt responded by imposing restrictions on Gaza, enforcing a blockade , and securing their borders. The purpose of these measures was to restrict the entry of weapons and reduce Hamas's access to military resources.
1.1. The Gaza Blockade
Since
only Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea, both states have the
clear right to regulate what passes through their own borders into Gaza. The
naval aspects of the restrictions fully comply with international law under the
, and the 2011
explicitly confirmed that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal
under international law. Egypt has likewise
maintained its own closed border
for similar security reasons, although this receives far less criticism.
The key legal question, therefore, is not whether border controls may
exist as such, but whether enough food and other humanitarian supplies, are
allowed to enter Gaza. In that sense, any serious discussion of the blockade
must begin with the pre-war baseline: how much actually entered Gaza before the
war, and what those deliveries consisted of.
1.2. Pre-war baseline
Between 2007 and the outbreak of the war on 7th of October 2023, Gaza's
population grew from roughly
to about
people. Enough food was entering Gaza, even with the population boom and
the growing demand because of it.
Food imports then rose over time, and during the final eight full
pre-war years, 2015–2022, the average amount of food entering Gaza was
, consisting mostly of
, all according to
discussed later in this article. For 2023, The Coordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the unit within
the Israeli Ministry of Defence responsible for
between Israel and the Gaza Strip,
of around 70 food trucks per day. In addition, Gaza also had some
domestic food production, which I estimate accounted for
roughly 12% of total food supply
,
as is sometimes claimed.
This suggests an approximate pre-war baseline of 82 food trucks/day:
- 73 trucks/day × 1.12 (domestic production) = 82
trucks/day.
That level of food was sufficient to feed Gaza’s population during the
eight years before the war. Yet because of a mixture of misinformation and
disinformation on social media, poor reporting by many major international
media outlets, and often unclear messaging from UN bodies, many people have
come to believe that Gaza needs far more food than this simply to avoid
starvation.
As a result, many find it difficult to believe that the amount of food
entering Gaza since the war began could have been sufficient. Instead,
starvation claims have often been accepted without demanding the level of data
and evidence needed to substantiate them. In the following chapters, we will
look at how this happened through the repeated use of figures taken out of
context and presented in ways that gave a distorted picture of reality.
2. How much food entered Gaza before the war?
From the moment that Israel left Gaza in 2005 and the blockade was
activated in 2007, the amount of food that has entered Gaza has gone up with
the population growth. In 2022 a total amount of 106,449 truckloads of
aid entered Gaza
official data and that amount was also almost exactly the same number as
the average of
that occured between the years of 2015 and 2021.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-2022
Taken together, these figures show an almost identical average number of
truckloads over eight consecutive years, from 2015 to 2022, with broadly
similar levels
until the Hamas attack on 7 October triggered the war. On that basis,
the pre-war average
truckloads per day. However, that number is easy to misinterpret,
because it includes many categories of goods other than food and therefore does
not, by itself, say much about Gaza’s actual food supply.
The first problem with this figure is that the often-cited average of
500 truckloads per day refers only to days
and goods were actually entering Gaza. It does not reflect the average
across the full calendar year. Crossings were not open every day; they were
closed on weekends, holidays, and during certain security incidents. According
to the UN data, in 2022 the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing operated
on
in total and the Egypt Rafah crossing were only open
.
Calculated across the full year, this corresponds to an average of
about
when the crossings were actually open, not 500. That is the more
meaningful baseline for understanding the pre-war flow of goods into Gaza. The
500 figure is therefore highly misleading if presented without explaining that
it refers only to open crossing days rather than to the year as a whole. This
was the first big step that made this false starvation narrative to take hold.
2.1. What the trucks actually carried
But even more importantly: The number of 290 trucks per calendar day
number also includes
that does not help feed the population of Gaza and is not needed in an
active war zone. Of the 290 trucks per calendar day going into Gaza in 2022,
50% included
and only
, according to the same official UN data.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-2022
2.2 Why is this important?
When discussing aid entering Gaza, the debate is usually centered on
whether enough food was allowed in. In that context, comparing the number of
aid trucks going in during the war to the 106,000 trucks per year that entered
Gaza before the war, when 53,000 of them carrying construction materials, is of
course misleading. Those shipments were not primarily food deliveries: They
included concrete, steel, and other non-food goods, much of which was
reportedly diverted by Hamas for military purposes,
.
But that is not the relevant comparison if the question is whether
civilians had enough food to eat since the war started. The only category that
truly matters in this question is human food products. If the claim is that
Gaza was deprived of sufficient food, then the analysis must focus on actual
food entering the Strip: how many trucks carried food on average and during
critical points of the conflict, how much tonnage they delivered in total, how
many calories that food represented, and whether that amount was enough for the
population or not.
Using total truck numbers
that include construction materials
,
(like electronics, clothing, cleaning products and furniture), and other
only confuses the issue. It inflates the comparison with categories that
are irrelevant to the core humanitarian question. The real question is not how
many trucks entered Gaza in total, but primarily how much edible food entered,
how regularly it entered, and whether the supply was sufficient when measured
against civilian needs.
2.3. How to calculate the number of trucks?
Let us verify the truck numbers through some simple calculations. In
2022, 74,096 truckloads
and 32,353 f
. This means that approximately 69.8% came through Israel and 30.2%
through Egypt. Together, this amounted to an average of about 500 trucks per
day when the crossings were open. But as said, the crossings were only open
for
on the Israeli side and
on the Egyptian side.
Calculated across the full calendar year of 2002, this gives an total
yearly average of:
- 203 trucks per calendar day from Israel
(74,096 / 365 = 202.99).
- 88.4 trucks per calendar day from Egypt
(32,353 / 365 = 88.64).
Combined, that equals 292 trucks per calendar day in total.
According to the data,
consisted of food. This gives:
- 292 × 0.25 = exactly 73 food trucks per day
So, the average amount was 73 food trucks per day between 2015 and 2021, when calculated across the full period and in 2022 alone:
2.4. How to use that number?
So now we have established how many trucks per day that are needed to
come in to the Gaza Strip to reach the same levels of food as before the war
started. But this is when the problems start to shape with the messaging of the
situation there...
The most striking features of the reporting on this issue is that
this baseline, of number of trucks going in before the war, has never been
stated clearly in any of the news reporting about this topic.
There is not a single international mainstream media outlet or NGO that has clearly stated this number, or any thing even close to this number, in any of their reportings about the food and aid situation inside Gaza. Outside a couple of articles in Israeli sources, like this article in The Times of Israel that reported that the prewar average was around 70, and academic reports from Israeli sources like "Debunking the Genocide Allegations",
using the number of 73 trucks with food per day on average before the war, there is no other real
examples of this that I have found.
This figure is somewhat acknowledged in Amnesty International's genocide allegation report from December 2024 (that I have made an article about found here ), which refers to a pre-war figure of roughly 75 trucks per day
carrying food.
This is what this reports says (on p. 172): "Before October 2023, according to OCHA, a daily average of 100 trucks carried food products into Gaza, of which about 75 trucks carried food products for humans and about 25 trucks carried livestock and animal feed. In April 2024, the Israeli government told the High Court of Justice that before 7 October 2023, an average of 70 food trucks entered Gaza per day."
However, this appears only as a quote in one sentence, in a 294-page report, and is not addressed any further, analysed or used as a baseline to compare how much food that entered during the war. Amnesty International did not seriously engage with what this baseline implies when later discussing wartime food deliveries and comparing them to claims about Gaza’s needs. Instead they claim another number as a pre-war baseline (also from p. 172): "Amnesty International established a baseline of 327 trucks entering Gaza on average every day between October 2022 to September 2023."
This is how much of the public confusion begins in cases like this. When
even the biggest NGOs chose a number that does not say anything about the
actual food demand in Gaza, as their baseline that they make all later
comparisons to. But at the same time: few people even read a report from
Amnesty, and almost no one actually does critical analysis of what is actually
written in these long and extensive reports. Instead, most people take in their
information about this war from either the mainstream media or the UN. But
their messaging are tragically even worse than what can be found in the report
by Amnesty International.
Let us now turn to that confusion more directly, and examine how the
messaging around Gaza’s food needs became so distorted...
3. Where the confusion about how much food Gaza needs comes from
Many people believe that the population of the Gaza Strip needs far more
than 73 food trucks per day in order to avoid starvation. This belief is driven
by a wide range of figures circulating online, in the news, and in messaging
from the UN and other organizations, many of which are misleading or lack the
necessary context. That creates a major problem: for an ordinary person, it
becomes almost impossible to understand what is actually realistic and true in
this issue, without spending a great deal of time researching it on their own.
Reaching a clear picture requires many hours of careful investigation, and
naturally very few people have the time, or interest to do that.
It is very common to hear, in both the press and social media, that
"Gaza needs 500 or 600 trucks of food per day to survive", or that
"this was the pre-war baseline that must be maintained in order to prevent
starvation". These figures are not grounded in reality, yet even the UN
itself often uses them in a misleading way. At the same time, almost no major
media outlet presents figures that are even close to the amount of food that
was actually needed in Gaza before the war. Let us first examine how the UN
uses these numbers, and then how they are repeated and amplified by the media.
3.1. Examples when the UN has used 500-600 trucks or similar
At several occasions, the UN has stated that the Gaza Strip needs 500 or
600 trucks worth of aid to reach pre-war numbers. As seen above, this is not
accurate. First of all: Gaza does not need that amounts of trucks per day of
aid, the pre-war baseline of trucks per calendar day was 290 trucks, not
500-600. Second, the amount of trucks before the war also included 75%
non human food items, like 50% construction materials, most of it not important
in a war.
Here are some examples from the UN uses these numbers from Hamas
start of the war on 7 October 2023, until summer 2025:
- UN 26 October 2023: "However, the daily average of trucks allowed into Gaza prior to the hostilities was about 500."
- OCHA (UN) 10 May 2024(day 217 of the war): "The pre-crisis average per working day in 2023 was 500 truck loads, including fuel."
- UNRWA 20 May 2025: "They need at minimum 500 or 600 trucks a day of medicine, fuel, food, vaccines for children, hygiene supplies-basic supplies that any human being needs."
- UNRWA 25 May 2025: "The least needed is 500-600 trucks every day managed through the UN including UNRWA."
- UN 26 May 2025(Facebook Post): "Humanitarians have repeatedly warned that at least 500 to 600 trucks need to cross into Gaza every day to provide people with their daily needs - as they did before war erupted on 7 October 2023 after Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel."
- UNRWA 28 July 2025: "We hope that UNRWA will be finally allowed to bring in thousands of trucks loaded with food, medicine and hygiene supplies. They are currently in Jordan and Egypt waiting for the green light. Opening all the crossings and flooding Gaza with assistance is the only way to avert further deepening of starvation among the people of Gaza. What’s needed is at least 500/600 trucks or basics every day."
3.2. Here are examples when the media has reported these numbers as
facts
If we now turn from the UN's official messaging to the role of the
international press, we find that major media outlets have repeatedly reported
these numbers as if they were straightforward facts, often without explaining
what the figures actually refer to. This confuses their readers, and other
outlets, and help establish these false claims as facts.
Here are 20 examples from when the international press used the
extremely misleading numbers between, from just a couple of days after the
outbreak of the war on 7 October 2023, until the ceasefire started on 10
October 2025:
- BBC 19 October 2023: "Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of UN relief agency UNRWA, told the BBC that about 500 trucks a day had been entering Gaza before the war started."
- BBC 22 October 2023: "Prior to the war, about 500 aid trucks a day were entering Gaza, said a spokesman from ActionAid Palestine."
- Time 24 October 2023, while citing the first BBC article: "How much aid went to Gaza before the war? Before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, Gaza’s 2.2 million citizens required an average of 500 trucks of aid and fuel per day from a number of organizations."
- Al Jazeera 30 November 2023: "Barely 10 percent of Gaza’s food sector needs are met. This is nowhere near enough, especially when you consider the fact that, before October 7, at least 500 trucks used to enter the Strip on a daily basis."
- NRP 21 February 2024: "Roughly 500 trucks of humanitarian aid alone - never mind commercial supplies - are needed each day to meet the basic needs of the people in Gaza, according to Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians."
- Washington Post 3 March 2024: "About 500 trucks entered Gaza each day before the war..."
- BBC 16 January 2025: "Before the conflict, there was an average of 500 truckloads of aid entering Gaza each working day" and "The pre-war average was 500 lorries per day - most were commercial imports".
- The guardian 17 January 2025 (now erased, but quote saved here): "Still, provisions under the deal are far from enough. Before the war, when Gaza had a functioning economy and farms supplying fresh produce, about 500 trucks entered daily. Over 15 months of fighting, shipments never approached that level."
- CNN 22 January 2025 (now erased, but quote saved here): "Before the war, an average of 500 trucks a day - around 15,000 trucks a month - containing aid and commercial goods entered Gaza per month."
- The Washington Post January 23 2025: "At several points during the 15-month conflict, aid slowed to just a single-digit trickle of trucks each day, down from an average of 500 that entered daily before the war."
- BBC 22 May 2025: "About 500 lorries entered the territory on average every day before the war, the UN has said."
- BBC live page 23 May 2025: "Before the war, about 500 lorries a day went into the Gaza Strip, brining food, medicin, baby food and medical equipment. That number dropped sharply when the war started. Now, UN bodies estimates 600 trucks a day are reequipred to begin tackling Gaza's humanitarian crisis" and again "The pre-war average was 500 lorries per day - most were commercial imports".
- BBC Arabic 24 May 2025(translated to english): "The United Nations says Gaza needs between 500 and 600 truckloads of supplies per day."
- Reuters 25 May 2025: "But getting the supplies to people sheltering in tents and other makeshift accommodation has been fitful and U.N. officials say at least 500 to 600 trucks of aid are needed every day."
- CBC News 28 July 2025: "On Sunday, 120 trucks worth of aid moved into Gaza. At least as much was expected to arrive on Monday — but it's not nearly enough. Before the war started, more 500 trucks per day was the norm."
- BBC 29 July 2025: "Before Hamas October 7 attack, around 650 lorries a day brought aid into Gaza."
- The Guardian 30 July 2025: "The number of aid trucks that have been entering Gaza... 200 trucks entering on Tuesday... However, the number of aid trucks still falls far below the 500-600 trucks the UN has said is necessary to sustain the 2 million residents of Gaza. Some aid agencies have suggested the true scale of need is now far greater than 600 trucks..."
- Al Jazeera 30 July 2025: "According to the UN, Gaza needs at least 500 to 600 aid trucks per day to meet basic humanitarian needs."
- Al Jazeera 2 August 2025: "Gaza’s Government Media office says only 73 aid trucks entered Gaza yesterday, far below the 500 to 600 the UN estimates are needed to meet residents’ daily needs."
- ABC News 10 October 2025: "Before the war, Belliveau said there were 500 to 600 trucks entering Gaza per day to meet the basic requirements of the civilian population, including food, medicine and supplies. Since March 2025, he said the number is down to 40 to 50 trucks per day, with sometimes no trucks entering."
Note: US calles them trucks and UK lorries.
3.3. Later BBC corrections
These were just some of the examples, there are many, many more. As noted above, two of the articles were later removed, perhaps because they contained incorrect or misleading information. But the others, however, remain online to this day. In response to some of the especially misleading figures repeated by the BBC, the UK outlet "Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis" (CAMERA) has pushed them to make corrections for their false claims, and in some cases they have succeeded with this.
On 4th of June 2025 BBC answered this, for the BBC verify and BBC Arabic articles from May 2025:
"The editors have reviewed the article and have made amendments to
make clear the difference between the delivery of ‘aid/supplies’ and
food."
But after this correction the BBC continued to use the wrong numbers. This can be seen the 29 July 2025 article , stating an even higher number than before, during the period that the narrative was most important. This is important because it shows that even the worlds biggest and highest respected media organisation, don't care about accuracy when it comes to this topic. Even when they have been corrected before, they still share the same numbers and take away all the context, and even inflating them to even higher numbers. That is narrative warfare, nothing else.
On 10 March 2026 BBC
did a small correction to the 650 number:
"Update 10 March 2026: We have amended this text to make clear that
the lorries entering Gaza before October 2023 were bringing in both aid and
commercial goods."
https://camera-uk.org/2026/03/15/bbc-corrects-inaccurate-gaza-food-aid-claim-seven-months-on/
But that correction came seven months after the original claim. First of all, that is far too late. Situations like this are exactly why so many people end up with the wrong impression of how much food Gaza actually needs. Second, the correction still does not clearly explain what the real number should be. It continues to refer to 650 trucks, only adding that this figure includes both aid and commercial goods . No ordinary reader will understand from that wording that the actual pre-war average was only about 73 trucks of food per day. But it is not like it matters much anyway. At that point, the damage had already been done after seven months of repeated misinformation.
What matters is getting the numbers right from the start, because
that is when the main impact of the headline and article occurs.
At the same time, establishing the correct pre-war baseline is only the
first step. It does not by itself answer how much food was needed once the war
began, because wartime conditions changed both the delivery system and the type
of assistance required.
4. The different situation in the war
As shown above, the pre-war baseline was around 73 food trucks per day, or roughly 82 when Gaza’s own production is included. But that still does not tell the full story of how much food was needed once the war began, nor does it by itself answer the legal question. The food delivery between 2015 and 2022 was suited for peacetime operations, with mostly commercial food going in, not war operations aimed to prevent starvation in an active warzone . As soon as the war began, that situation changed.
If the blockade is to be assessed seriously under international law, the wartime conditions must also be taken into account. The relevant issue is not whether aid entered Gaza under the same peacetime conditions as before 7 October, but whether sufficient food and humanitarian supplies were allowed to enter under the very different conditions that existed after the war began. To understand that, it is first necessary to look at what the situation on the ground actually was.
4.1. The conditions on the ground didn't allow mass aid to enter Gaza
the first weeks after the war broke out
On the the 7 October 2023 attack, Hamas and the thousands of Gazans that attacked Israel that day and 9 out of 10 electricity lines from Israel into Gaza was damaged. Hamas also took control of, attacked and heavily damaged, all the border crossings between Israel and Gaza. They left roads inside Israel, that was near the border, filled with thousands of burned vehicles and they filled all of the border areas, both on the Israeli and Gaza side, with improvised explosive devices (IED's), and booby traps. Hamas also didn't stop the attacking after that day; they continued to maintain active control of Gaza-side infrastructure, tunnels, and forces, that was completely outside of Israeli control at the time. Hamas also fired tens of thousands of rockets directly toward the area with the border crossings and aid routes Israel would use to send aid to Gaza. From October 7 to mid 2024, Hamas fired 19,000 rockets against Israel . An illustration of this can be seen in an animation here, together with other states firing against Israel at the same time.
No military in the world could have safely flooded an active war zone, controlled to 100% by the enemy, with hundreds of aid trucks on day one, after a war had just started against them. Repair crews, inspectors, and drivers faced mortal danger and even though Israeli leaders demanded repair of infrastructure soon after, it took time to complete as many workers were too scared to do work at the borders naturally, and this was an ongoing threat. It also took time to secure the important areas of the Gaza side of the border again and then change the delivery system from a peace based system with focus on commercial products , to a war suited system with focus on humanitarian aid . Gaza already had substantial food supplies inside the territory when the war began, and by January 2024 the aid delivery system had largely shifted toward emergency food suited to wartime conditions, with the aim of preventing starvation.
4.2. How much food entered Gaza directly after the war began?
The first weeks after 7 October, the food delivery mostly halted because of the security situation at the borders. But it recovered rather quick, step by step, the following months. According to UN data , the number of trucks carrying food almost reached the pre-war levels of 73 trucks per day already in November. It reached 55,5 trucks of food that month, from Egypt's more secure border, and just falling short of it in December 2023 with 69,5 trucks/day with food on average.
From 17 December 2023, the UN data shows that aid was starting to enter from the Israeli side and from that day most of the aid into the Gaza Strip came from Israel, not Egypt. By January 2024 the number of trucks of food exceeded the pre-war numbers, with 96,5 trucks per day entering Gaza on average, and most of it from then and onwards came from Israel's side, not Egypt. From the beginning of November 2023 to the end of February 2024, a total of 8,666 trucks came into the Gaza Strip according to the UN data.
During this 120 day period, many people claims that Gaza was starving,
but the daily average of these four months were 72,2 trucks per day with food
according to this UN data (Nov: 1667 + Dec: 2152 +Jan: 2990 + Feb: 1857 =
Total: 8666 and 8666 / 120 = 72,2).
All of these numbers can be seen here on this image from the UN site:
This is the amount of food that entered Gaza between October 7 2023 and
January 2025 (highlighted ONLY food, after clicking on the orange box in the
bottom of the image), source: UN Dashboard.
But this part is important to understand correctly: the food entering Gaza after the war started was not the same type of food mix that had entered before the war, during peacetime. Before the war started, the majority of the food that entered Gaza was normal commercial goods , under normal market conditions. When the trucks started to go into Gaza again in November, by contrast, the overwhelming majority consisted of humanitarian aid , designed to deliver calories as efficiently as possible in a crisis.
4.2.1. A closer look at the UN data from January 2024
A closer look at the January 2024 figures shows more clearly what kind of food deliveries are reflected in the UN data . For the full month, food deliveries consisted of 89% humanitarian food aid and 11% commercial food items. This distinction matters because it shows that the food entering Gaza was no longer primarily ordinary commercial supply . Instead, the overwhelming majority consisted of emergency humanitarian aid designed to provide calories as efficiently as possible under wartime conditions.
These figures can be seen in the UN dashboard when selecting food only, by clicking the orange category box at the bottom of the image:
This is the amount of food that entered Gaza in January 2024
(highlighted ONLY food, after clicking on the orange box in the bottom of the
image), source: UN Dashboard.
4.2.2. A comparison to the COGAT data from January 2024
The UN figures can also be confusing, because other official datasets report different totals for the same period. For January 2024, the dashboard showing official COGAT data , reported that 3,364 food trucks, as well as 7 pallets delivered by Jordanian airdrops. That amounts to approximately 108.5 food trucks per day in the COGAT data, plus about 4 tons of food delivered by air, rather than the 96.5 trucks per day shown in the UN data.
This can be seen in the image below:
In addition, the COGAT site also states this importantly:
"Trucks that are categorized as "mixed aid" and
"shelter equipment" may also contain food items."
This article will mostly focus on the reported number of food trucks, that are explicitly stated as carrying food items exclusively on the COGAT site . But it is also important to know that during the entire war, from October 2023 to October 2025, a total amount of 6,058 trucks has entered Gaza with mixed deliveries and 13,889 trucks with shelter equipment. This gives an average of 27.3 trucks per day during the 730 days of the war in total for the entire war, with an unknown amount of trucks containing food in unknown quantities.
4.2.3. What does this difference mean?
This means that even when discussing the same month, different
official-looking datasets present different totals. As a result, readers and
journalists may come away with a misleading or incomplete understanding of how
much food actually entered Gaza during that period.
The same pattern can also be seen in at every months after January 2024,
when the two datasets are compared. This means that the discrepancy is not an
isolated one-month anomaly, but part of a broader and more consistent
difference in how the figures are recorded and presented. That matters, because
even if many journalists, commentators, and readers would rely on these
numbers, many would do it without realizing that the UN and COGAT are not
necessarily measuring the exact same flow of goods in the same way.
Before drawing conclusions from either dataset, it is therefore necessary to understand what each of them actually includes, what they leave out, and why their totals differ.
4.3. What does the difference from UN and COGAT data come from?
The difference between the UN and COGAT figures stems from the fact that the UN, in its published numbers, counts its own aid deliveries and only those of some other actors, while COGAT includes a broader set of deliveries. Other actors and organizations also help facilitate the delivery of aid and goods into Gaza, and these are reflected in the COGAT data but are not always fully captured in the UN presentation. These actors include a range of international organizations, mixed donor arrangements, individual countries, and NGOs.
This is what the actual list of aid donors looked like in the COGAT data , when selecting food only for the first days of January 2024:
As shown above, between 1-4 January 2024, there were 18 separate food
deliveries into Gaza during this four-day period, with a total of 440 trucks
and one airdrop, according to
the COGAT data . Out of these 440 trucks, UN agencies accounted for 193 trucks in total (39 + 30 + 53 + 71), while other actors accounted for 247 trucks.
However, as shown below, the UN dashboard reports only 359 food truckloads for the same period:
This means that for the exact same timeframe, the four first days of
January 2024,
COGAT counted 440 trucks while the UN recorded 359 trucks צ, a difference of 82 trucks in total. That is not a small discrepancy. It amounts to more than 20 trucks per day on average, which is a significant gap in a discussion where truck numbers are constantly used to make claims about whether Gaza was receiving enough food or not.
The comparison also helps illustrate where part of the discrepancy, when
it comes to the full discussions about this topic, comes from. The UN agencies
accounted for less than half of the trucks recorded by COGAT during these days,
while a large share came from other actors. If some of those deliveries are not
fully reflected in the UN presentation, the result is that the UN figures can
give a substantially lower impression of the actual food flow into Gaza.
4.4. What does UN say about this difference in numbers?
So now we have established that there is a significant difference in the
number of trucks that the UN counts on their site in comparison to what COGAT
shows on theirs. How do we know who to believe in this case, do COGAT inflate
their numbers for propaganda purposes?
To answer this, let's look at what the UN states for their later data:
"Collected humanitarian truckloads as monitored by UN agencies,
excluding fuel and some cargo collected by NGOs and third parties."
For data from 7 May 2024 and onward, the UN clarifies this even further:
"Commercial trucks are not captured in the totals after 7 May, as
the UN has been unable to directly observe the arrival of private sector cargo.
Since that time, some of the collected truckloads have also not reached their
destinations due to security incidents, including armed looting."
This proves that the UN does not count everything entering Gaza.
Instead, they only count the truckloads that UN agencies are able to monitor
directly, while excluding some cargo collected by NGOs, third parties, and
later also commercial deliveries that the UN could no longer directly observe.
That is a problem, when the COGAT data shows that 57,6% of the food deliveries between May and September 2024 was from the private sector.
In other words, the UN is transparent about the fact that it's figures do not represent the full picture. That is what largely explains the discrepancy between the UN and COGAT data throughout 2024, until the UN stopped using this dashboard in January 2025 and later moved to another reporting system, in May 2025.
4.4.1. Trends in the UN data for 2024
On the UN dashboard , the number of food trucks can be seen declining after April 2024 and toward the end of the year, with July being a notable exception to that trend. This trend can be seen in this graph:
In total, for all of 2024, the UN data shows 33,964 food trucks , which equals an average of about 93 food trucks per day during the year.
4.4.2. Comparisons to the COGAT data for 2024
At the same time, COGAT reported 41,587 trucks and 10,436 pallets , which equals an average of about 114 trucks per day and 28.6 pallets per day across the year. Depending on the weight of the pallets, that likely adds up to roughly the equivalent of another two truckloads per day.
This suggests that the UN data captured only around 80% of the incoming
food truck flow that was recorded by COGAT, during the full year of 2024. In
addition, the 904,059 tons of food that was recorded by COGAT gives 21,74 tons
of food per truck on average (904,059 / 41,587 = 21.74). This stat is also very
useful, because it gives a clearer sense of the actual volume of food entering
Gaza, rather than focusing only on truck counts.
All of this can be seen in the image below:
This shows that the food trucks entering Gaza in 2024 were carrying very large loads, with a high average tonnage of food aid per truck (21.74 tons). Taken together, it also shows that the UN figures are not false, but incomplete by design. They reflect what UN agencies were able to monitor directly, not necessarily the full volume of food entering Gaza. For that reason, the UN data is of limited value if used on its own, because it appears to capture only around 80% of the food trucks that actually entered Gaza.
4.5. Amnesty International used UNRWA data instead of the full UN
dataset or COGAT
The picture becomes even more complicated because in addition to the broader UN data presented through UN-HCOA, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) also keeps its own separate statistics on the aid it delivers into Gaza. Some organizations rely on this narrower UNRWA dataset instead of the fuller UN data or COGAT data in order to argue that the amount of food entering Gaza has been insufficient.
4.5.1. Comparing UNRWA and COGAT numbers
The most important example of this is Amnesty International’s genocide allegation report against Israel, in which Amnesty argued that insufficient aid was entering Gaza and highlighted differences between the figures reported by COGAT and UNRWA, especially for May and June 2024.
The graph Amnesty used here compares food trucks and presents UNRWA
against COGAT:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/
However, these differences did not simply reflect a lack of aid entering Gaza. A major part of the explanation is that Israel blocked UNRWA from continuing its previous role in aid delivery after large numbers of UNRWA employees were alleged or found to have links to Hamas, including involvement in the 7 October 2023 attacks.
4.5.2. What the UN data shows for the same period
But even more important, this is not what the UN's own broader data shows regarding the amount of food that actually entered Gaza during those two months, May and June 2024.
Before May 2024, the UN dashboard shows that all of the food trucks, that was monitored by the UN, was entering Gaza through UNRWA:
But from 7 May 2024 onward, the structure changed. As the UN's own data shows, when counting all food trucks recorded by the UN rather than only
UNRWA's trucks, the average was around 120 trucks per day in May 2024 and 96
trucks per day in June 2024.
Source: UN Dashboard.
4.5.3. More comparisons of UNRWA and COGAT data
First of all it is important to remember that the figure Amnesys had in their report only showed 53 trucks from UNRWA in May 2024 and 30 in June. When comparing this to the COGAT data , the difference is striking. The COGAT data instead showed 166 trucks with food for May 2024 and 134 for June. This is 113 trucks per day lower in May 2024 than the UNRWA number shows and 104 lower in June.
What this means is that the UNRWA data that Amnesty uses, only shows 32% of the number that COGAT shows for May and 22% for June.The UN data also clearly shows that UNRWA was no longer responsible for all UN food deliveries from May onward. Instead, during May and June 2024, UNRWA accounted for only about 64% of the food deliveries counted by the UN, while the World Food Programme (WFP) accounted for about 36% during the same period.
4.5.4. What this means for the Amnesty International report
This means that Amnesty International did not use the broader figures presented on the UN site, or the even broader figures reported by COGAT. Instead, it relied on the narrowest dataset available when evaluating the food situation during the final part of the period covered by its report. Amnesty chose to use the UNRWA figures even though the UN’s own data showed that UNRWA no longer represented the full UN aid operation during those months.As a result, Amnesty presented a substantially lower picture of the aid flow than even the UN’s broader figures support. The UNRWA data it used captured only part of the food entering Gaza through the UN system, while also excluding additional deliveries recorded by COGAT from actors outside the UN framework.
This matters because it means that the apparent drop in food deliveries
during May and June 2024 was exaggerated by the choice of dataset. What
happened was not simply that food stopped entering Gaza, but that the delivery
structure changed. Israel restricted UNRWA's role because of allegations of
Hamas links among UNRWA personnel, while a larger share of the operation was
transferred to other actors, especially the World Food Programme and the
broader UN-HCOA framework. In practical terms, Amnesty used the most
restrictive and incomplete dataset available, and in doing so created the
impression of a far sharper collapse in aid than the broader evidence supports.
That gives the reader a misleading picture of the underlying reality.
More about the Amnesty International report in my article here.
4.6. What does all of this mean for the public opinion?
For readers trying to make sense of this issue, the information
environment about this topic is extremely messy and confusing. Many people,
including journalists and commentators, look only at the UN or UNRWA figures
and assume that they reflect the full picture of all aid entering Gaza. But
they do not. Others read reports such as Amnesty International's and see large
gaps between COGAT and UNRWA figures, without understanding that the data sets
are not measuring the same thing and are not intended to capture the same scope
of deliveries. When presented in that way, the comparison easily creates doubt
about the Israeli figures.
In some cases, the selective use of these data sources gives the
impression of an underlying agenda: namely, to present the food flow into Gaza
as substantially lower than it actually was, in order to support the argument
that Israel was not allowing sufficient food to enter. For the average reader,
this makes it very easy to conclude that not enough food was entering Gaza
during this period. That impression is driven partly by the UN's lack of clear
communication about what its numbers do and do not include, and partly by the
bias of NGOs, media outlets, and members of the public who are often unwilling
to treat Israeli data as potentially accurate even when later evidence supports
it. The UN itself has stated that its figures do not include all actors delivering
food into Gaza, and its totals are therefore significantly lower than those
reported by COGAT, by roughly 20%.
With time, the 2024 COGAT figures appear to have been the reality, because the large-scale starvation outcomes projected in the early IPC reports of 2023 and 2024 did not occur. The actual number of deaths from starvation was vastly lower than those projections suggested.
5. How much food do Gaza need then?
When the war began, the food supply system changed significantly.
Israel shifted from allowing mostly commercial food goods to allowing a
much larger share of humanitarian food aid. This meant that many non-essential
items such as candy, soft drinks, cheese, and other less calorie-efficient or
less practical products largely disappeared from the deliveries. Instead, the
food entering Gaza became increasingly focused on high-calorie staple goods
that are easier to store, easier to transport in large quantities, and less
dependent on refrigeration.
5.1. What is included in the humanitarian food?
This video shows what is inside a Gaza aid package from the UN aid organisation the World Food Programme (WFP), and the image below shows what is in the food boxes provided by the American organization, The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF):
Now we know what kind of food that gets delivered to the people in Gaza, in the humanitarian aid. But how much food do they need to eat? To answer this, let's use the WFP / UNHCR official guidelines for estimating food and nutritional needs in emergencies. In these guidelines they conclude that the minimum ration should aim at providing 2,100 kilocalories per person per day, and that at least 10-12% of the total energy should come from protein and 17% from fat.
This is a normal daily ramson that WFP suggests:
- 400g of rice, bulgur or flour.
- 60g pulses (beans, peas, lentils etc).
- 25g oil.
- 50g fortified blended foods (aid mix typically cereal-legume mixes enriched with vitamins and minerals).
- 15g sugar.
- 5g iodized salt (0 kcal).
This gives around 555g of food per day (in dry weight).
The calorie content can be estimated as follows (with other sources
showing around the same kcal counts as WFP):
- Rice has 350 kcal per 100g = 1400 kcal / 400g.
- Beans has 330 kcal per 100g = 200 kcal / 60g.
- Oil has 880 kcal per 100g = 220 kcal / 25g.
- Fortified blended foods has 380 kcal per 100g = 190 kcal / 50g.
- Sugar has 400 kcal per 100g = 60 kcal / 15g.
This gives a total of approximately 2070 kcal by the calculations above for the full 555g ration by using household kcal stats, or 2,113 kcal according to the WFP / UNHCR official guidelines . This shows that around 550g of food from the WFP food basket is enough to reach the 2100 kcal planning goal for a population living in warmer conditions (like Gaza), fully dependent on aid.
5.2. The demographic situation in Gaza
The humanitarian planning standard of 2100 kcal
a more typical population structure. Gaza, however, has an unusually young population. Roughly speaking, it can be simplified as consisting of around 50% children and 50% adults , with about 30% of the population under the age of 14 and 70% being under the age of 30 at the same time that males and females making up roughly equal shares overall. Therefore, this study has estimated the requirement of the population in Gaza to 1,934 kcal per person per day. As shown above, humanitarian aid food in this example provides about 2,100 kcal per 555g, which equals roughly 3.8 kcal per gram.
What this means when using the 1,934 kcal/person/day number:
1,934 / 3.8 = 509g of food/person/day. If Gaza’s population is estimated at around 2.1 million people, after hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have left during the war via expensive bribes across the Egyptian border , this results in a total daily food requirement of roughly:
2.1 million × 0.509 kg = approximately 1,069,000 kg/day.
That is approximately 1,07 metric tons (MT) per day. A typical truck entering Gaza can carry up to 25 tons, while the average food truck reported by COGAT in 2024 was 21.7 MT per truck .
On that basis, the daily requirement would be:
1,069,000 kg demand per day / 21.7 per truck = 49.3 trucks per day.
In other words, using the observed 2024 average load per truck, the
implied requirement is roughly 49 food trucks per day. This figure does
not yet include any margin for distribution losses, food left behind, waste, or
uneven access. Nor does it account for whatever domestic food production may
still have remained inside Gaza. Even so, it provides a useful approximation of
the population’s underlying food requirement.
- If this figure is used as a baseline and a 25%
margin is added, the result becomes roughly 62 trucks per day: 49.3 × 1.25
= 61.6 trucks/day.
- If a hefty 50% margin is added instead, the result
becomes roughly 74 trucks per day: 49.3 × 1.5 = 74 trucks/day.
Under those assumptions, even a very large safety margin produces a figure that remains close to the pre-war level of 73 food trucks per day, before also taking account of Gaza’s own domestic production before the war. The exact size of the necessary safety margin cannot be known with exact precision. But it is at least highly plausible that the required margin would be quite a bit lower when the inflow consists mainly of emergency humanitarian food designed to maximize calories, rather than ordinary commercial supply under peacetime conditions. By the UN data , the total ratio of humanitarian food trucks in comparison to commercial, from October 2023 to December 2024, was 75% humanitarian against 25% commercial. A reasonable working estimate would therefore fall somewhere between the 25% and 50% margin scenarios.
If a one-third safety margin is used, the result is:
49.3 × 1.333 = 65.7 trucks per day
In other words, a practical estimate would be roughly 66 food trucks
per day.
5.3. The point of all these numbers
To summarize this section, the public messaging from the UN, media
outlets, and many commentators has often suggested that Gaza needs around
500-600 trucks per day, sometimes even 650 trucks per day. But those figures
are highly misleading if it is understood as the amount of food actually needed
to prevent starvation. Before the war, the average amount of food entering Gaza
was about 73 food trucks per day, in addition to Gaza’s own food production,
which accounted for roughly 12% of total supply. Together, that corresponds to
approximately 82 food trucks per day under pre-war conditions.
At the same time, a closer calculation of actual food demand gives a
much lower figure than the one commonly repeated in public debate. When Gaza’s
demographic structure is taken into account, and when the food is assumed to
consist largely of humanitarian emergency aid rather than ordinary commercial
products, the estimated requirement is far lower. The demand appears to be
closer to be somewhere around 66 food trucks per day in total, not 500–650.
In other words, the figures most often repeated in the public debate do not
describe the actual food requirement of Gaza’s population. Instead it shows a
number 87-90% higher number than the reality.
6. The flawed reporting about the food situation continued into 2025
The same problems in reporting and public messaging did not end in 2024. They continued into 2025 and got even worse, when major claims about Gaza's food situation were still being presented in ways that were often misleading, incomplete, or lacking necessary context. To understand this, it is important to look first at what happened during the ceasefire period.
6.1. Aid during the ceasefire
From 19 January 2025 to 1 March 2025, a temporary ceasefire was in place in Gaza. During this period, large volumes of humanitarian aid entered the territory. According to available data from COGAT , also used by the UN, approximately 380,000 metric tons (MT) of food were delivered during these two months. That amount came from 18,471 trucks worth of food in total, which amounts to 313 trucks/day on average in January and February 2025. At the same time, the UN stated that Gaza "requires" around 60,000 MT of aid per month. However, as shown in previous sections, the methodology behind these estimates can be unclear, and it is not always specified how much of this refers specifically to food for human consumption.
If we take the 60,000 MT/month figure at face value, as presented:
- 60,000,000 kg / 2,200,000 people = 27.27 kg per
person per month.
- 27.27 / 30 = 0.91 kg per person per day,
This implies a requirement of roughly 900 grams of food per person per day. However, this estimate is significantly higher than the previously calculated needs of 509 grams of food, based on demographic structure and caloric requirements.
6.2. Estimated food sufficiency during the ceasefire
Using the previously established framework, we can estimate how long
380,000 MT of food would last under different assumptions.
6.2.1. Using the UN calculations:
- Daily requirement: 2.1 million people ×
0.9 kg/day = 1,890,000 kg/day.
- Duration: 380,000,000 kg / 1,890,000
kg/day = 201 days. 201 days = 6 months and 2.5 weeks.
This scenario has a huge safety marginal of around 80% extra food
demand, baked in the 900g number. Even if this number was true, the baseline to
use to calculate how much extra food that has gone in during the time should be
judged by the actual demand, not margins on margins.
6.2.2. Demographically adjusted scenario:
- Daily requirement: 2.1 million people × 0.509
kg/day = 1,068,900 kg/day.
- Duration: 380,000,000 kg / 1,068,900 kg/day = 355,5
days. 355,5 days = 11 months and 3 weeks.
These two scenarios show the scale of the aid delivered during the
ceasefire from two very different starting points. Even when the much higher UN
planning figure of 0.9 kg per person per day is used, the food delivered during
January and February 2025 corresponds to more than six and a half months of
supply. When the lower, demographically adjusted estimate is used, the same
volume corresponds to almost a full year.
The difference between these two outcomes is important. The UN-based
scenario already builds in a very large margin, whereas the demographically
adjusted scenario is closer to the population’s estimated underlying caloric
demand. For that reason, the most useful way to proceed is not to treat either
figure as exact, but to use them as upper and lower reference points.
With that baseline established, the next step is to apply reasonable
margins for waste, uneven distribution, food left behind, and local access
problems, and then compare those adjusted requirements to the volume of food
that actually entered Gaza in the months that followed.
6.2.3. Adding a Safety Margin
If a safety margin is added to the demographically adjusted estimate of
1,068,900 kg per day, the duration still remains very substantial.
- With a 25% margin: 1,068,900 × 1.25 =
1,336,125 kg/day. 380,000,000 / 1,336,125 = 284 days. 284 days = 9
months and 1.5 weeks.
- With a 33% margin: 1,068,900 × 1.333 =
1,424,844 kg/day. 380,000,000 / 1,424,844 = 267 days. 267 days = 8
months and 3.5 weeks.
- With a 50% margin: 1,068,900 × 1.5 =
1,603,350 kg/day. 380,000,000 / 1,603,350 = 237 days. 237 days = 7
months and 3.5 weeks.
Even under the 50% margin scenario, it amounted to the same number of 73
trucks average as the pre-war with commercial goods, the food delivered during
the ceasefire would still correspond to nearly eight months of supply for the
whole Gaza Strip. This matters because the public narrative in mid-2025 was
often framed as if Gaza had been left with almost no food at all. But that is
difficult to reconcile with the volume of food delivered during the ceasefire.
If at least almost 8 months worth of food entered in January and February
alone, then later claims of immediate, territory-wide starvation require much
stronger explanation than was usually provided.
But these were the trucks that had food items exclusively. Remember the
"mixed-aid trucks" and "shelter trucks" from earlier, which
can also contain food items? For these two months there were 1,430 trucks of
mixed aid registered and 5,448 trucks of shelter equipment. There is no way to
know much food these included in total, but they together amounts to 114.6
trucks per day on average for these two months (1,430 + 5,448 = 6878 / 60 =
114.6). There is at least no reason to think that these numbers didn't matter
at all, they most likely had a lot of food in them too that wasn't not counted
in the same way.
All of this does not necessarily mean that all food reached all parts of the population equally. Distribution challenges, security issues, local shortages, access constraints and the poorest people not being able to buy food that Hamas sells on markets (that should be free but aren't) can still lead to uneven outcomes on the ground. However, that is outside Israeli control and this does indicate that the aggregate volume of food entering Gaza during this period was very large relative to estimated caloric requirements. If the average amounts of food going in is much higher than pre-war, it should be enough. The relevant question when it comes to the public narrative in mid-2025, is therefore not only how much food entered in May, June, or July in isolation, but how those later deliveries interacted with the very large food inflow that had already entered during the ceasefire.
6.3. Why did Israel reduce aid deliveries?
After the ceasefire ended in early March 2025, Israel temporarily halted the flow of humanitarian aid, a suspension that lasted until 19 May 2025 . This decision followed the breakdown of negotiations over the release of hostages. From Israel's perspective, restricting aid was intended as a way to increase pressure on Hamas. That strategy rested on the assumption that the large volume of food that had entered during the ceasefire meant that Gaza would not immediately face a genuine shortage. At the same time, discussions were underway, reportedly involving the United States and then-President Donald Trump, about restructuring the aid system in the same time.
The purpose of that restructuring was to reduce Hamas’s control over food distribution and replace parts of the existing system with a new framework, later known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was implemented in late May 2025 . This marked a significant shift in how aid was delivered for the remainder of the war, until the October 2025 ceasefire.
6.4. The UN warnings and public narrative
Whatever the strategic logic behind Israel's decision, the suspension
created a major opportunity for dramatic and often misleading public messaging
about starvation. The ceasefire ended on 1 March 2025, which was a Saturday,
and the blockade of aid was declared by Israel on the next day.
6.4.1. Warnings of limited aid and rising prices
After the blockade started on Sunday 2 March 2025, it only took one more day before international organisations and the UN already claimed that aid was running out in Gaza. This is what Reuters wrote about the situation on 3 March 2025:
"Food, medicine and shelter stockpiles in Gaza are limited and aid
intended for Palestinians in desperate need may spoil following Israel's
suspension of deliveries to the enclave, humanitarian agencies said on
Monday... 'Much of what has come in over the past few weeks has already been
distributed... Now, already we are seeing price increases', a U.N. official in
Gaza told Reuters."
"'The spike in food and good prices is creating fear and uncertainty', Caroline Seguin, MSF emergency coordinator, in Gaza told Reuters" Food do not enter Gaza on Saturdays during this conflict so this statement came only after one day without aid, directly following the biggest influx of aid in Gaza history that went on for two months in a row, that also followed an already large influx in December 2024. The comment of price increases also becomes were silly when looking at the actual WFP official food pricing data from the Gaza Strip between December 2024 and March 2025.
Let's examine the price in ILS (Shekels) for what are likely the three
most important food items in the official data, the 1 KG Egyptian rice, 1 KG
Chickpeas and 1 KG flour packages. At this date (2026-04-15), one ILS is around
$0.33 USD and €0.28 EURO:
- December 2024 : Rice = 16 ILS ($5.3, €4.5). Chickpeas = 32 ILS ($10.6, €9.0). Flour = 1 ILS ($0.3, €0.3).
- January 2025 (after the ceasefire started): Rice = 10 ILS ($3.3, €2.8). Chickpeas = 11 ILS ($3.0, €2.5). Flour = 1 ILS ($0.3, €0.3).
- February 2025 (fourth week): Rice = 2.5 ILS ($0.8, €0.7). Chickpeas = 5 ILS ($1.7, €1.4). Flour = 1 ILS ($0.3, €0.3).
- March 2025 (first week): Rice = 3 ILS ($1.00, €0.85). Chickpeas = 8 ILS ($2.7, €2.3). Flour = UNKNOWN.
- May 2025 (fourth week): Rice 18 ILS ($6.0, €5.1). Chickpeas = 30 ILS ($10.0, €8.5). Flour = UNKNOWN.
NOTE: WFP only show flour in packages of 25 KG from March and onward,
therefore no comparisons can be made after that point.
What can be seen in these prices?
In March 2025 the prices had gone up a little from the record low prices in February 2025, but was still very cheap. But in the end of May 2025, 2.5 months after the blockade began, the prices was still around the same as in December. In Israel 1 KG white rice costs 12 ILS , which is many times higher than January-March prices in Gaza, but 33% lower than what the price was in the end of May in Gaza when Israel re-started the food deliveries to Gaza again. But one single day after the temporary blockade started, how come the UN already complains about the prices in the end of that week when the prices of rice were still 1/4 of the price in Tel Aviv that has the same currency?
The key point is therefore that the public messaging escalated quickly.
The warnings came immediately after the suspension began, even though Gaza had
just experienced the largest food influx of the war and staple-price data did
not indicate an acute territory-wide breakdown. This gap between rhetoric and
evidence is important, and it foreshadowed the much more dramatic warning that
followed in late May 2025...
6.4.2. The UN statement: 14,000 babies will die in 48 hours.
On 20 May 2025, the day after Israel re-started the food deliveries to Gaza, UN Special Coordinator Tom Fletcher made a widely quoted statement. “14,000 babies will die within 48 hours if aid is not delivered.” Whatever the intention behind the statement, it spread globally within hours and strongly reinforced the perception that mass starvation was already imminent in May. What this episode illustrates is how quickly headline figures and dramatic projections can shape public perception.
The outcome?
By the end of December 2024 a total amount of 54 people was reported to have died by malnutrition in Gaza (likely most of them or all, with pre-existing health conditions ). By 19 July 2025 that total amount had only gone up to 68, which equals to 14 more than at the start of the year, which amounts to 2.1 per month on average during this period of time in 2025. It means that it was likely around 4-5 deaths by malnutrition between Tom Fletcher's statement and the 68 number by 19 July. If 4 people died over 61 days, that corresponds to only 0.13 deaths per 48 hours. Compared to Tom Fletcher’s claim that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours, the implied death rate was therefore more than 100,000 times higher than the actual observed rate.
This matters even more because Fletcher did not say 14,000 people. He
said 14,000 babies. That choice of words maximized the emotional impact; it
also implied an even larger unseen catastrophe beyond it, because if 14,000
babies were supposedly about to die within 48 hours, then the total number of
deaths across the rest of the population would have to be even higher.
Nothing even remotely close to that happened, at that time or later
on in the conflict.
6.5. Other media outlets followed - Let's discuss an example article from The Guardian
When the biggest international media outlets later discussed the food situation in Gaza, it was almost as if the enormous influx of aid at the beginning of 2025 had never happened. For an example, at the end of July 2025 The Guardian published an article named "The mathematics of starvation: How Israel caused a famine in Gaza". This article discussed the situation in Gaza at that time. Let's examine that article here.
6.5.1. Pre-war numbers cited by The Guardian
The Guardian started their article by stating the needs of the Palestinians in Gaza, when it comes to food in kilograms and calories:
"An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later. COGAT, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food."
But when looking at the actual court document Guardian talks about, that was released then, these numbers are clearly taken out of context. These court documents
said the following:
"According to the model supplied by the Israeli Ministry of Health,
there is a need for a daily supply of 104 food trucks (5 days a week)."
But they clarify these numbers further later in the document, by showing
that these 104 trucks only included 77 food trucks carrying actual human food
and the rest other types of products like: Agriculture, medicine, medical
equipment, hygiene products and essential humanitarian infrastructure products.
In addition, 104 food trucks, 5 days a week only amounts to 74 trucks per day
(7 / 5 = 1.4 and 104 / 1.4 = 74).
Therefore the number of trucks suggested to be needed to enter Gaza then
was not only including food items. With only 77 actual food trucks per day
entering 5 days per week it meant that only 55 trucks per day was being planned
for at that moment (77 / 1.4 = 55).
Remember my calculations from earlier:
- The requirement in Gaza is likely: 1,934 kcal/person/day.
- The ratio of humanitarian aid food: 2,100 kcal /
555g = 3.8 kcal/g.
- 1,934 / 3.8 = 509g of food/person/day.
- 2.1 million people × 0.509 kg of aid food = 1,069,000
kg/day.
- 1,069,000 kg demand per day / 21.7 per truck = 49.3
trucks per day.
The numbers that The Guardian cite of "an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day"
is taken from COGAT wanting to have a hefty safety marginal against the recommendation numbers from WFP (2,100 calories per day) and UNRWA (1,900 calories per day), used as a baseline by COGAT. More importantly, the 1.836 kg figure was based on a very different food basket from the one relevant during the war. When the underlying numbers in the court document is examined, much of that weight comes from products such as fruit, vegetables, and milk. Those foods are much heavier per calorie, more difficult to store, and far less representative of the calorie-dense emergency aid that later entered Gaza during the war.
This can be seen in this table below:
This distinction is crucial. A wartime humanitarian food system is not
designed to reproduce a normal peacetime consumer diet by weight. It is
designed to prevent hunger and malnutrition as efficiently as possible, often
through dry staples and fortified foods that deliver more calories per
kilogram, like 400g of rice, 60g beans, 25g oil, 50g fortified blended foods,
15g sugar and 5g salt all giving a total amount of 2100 kcal per day. To istead
using a pre-war food-weight model built around fresh produce and dairy as a
benchmark for wartime starvation therefore inflates the apparent shortfall from
the outset. By contrast, the wartime aid model discussed earlier in this
article produced roughly 2,100 kcal from about 555 g of food, or about 3.8
kcal per gram. Using the demographically adjusted estimate of 1,934 kcal
per person per day, this translated into a requirement of roughly 509 g
per person per day, not 1.836 kg. The difference is not minor. It reflects
two fundamentally different assumptions about what kind of food is being
delivered and what the benchmark is supposed to measure.
Taken together, this shows that the figures cited by The Guardian are not directly comparable to the situation during the war. The pre-war
model was based on a mixed supply system that included a large share of fresh and commercial food products such as fruit, vegetables, and dairy,
alongside non-food humanitarian goods. In contrast, the aid entering Gaza
during the war has largely (at least 75%) consisted of calorie-dense emergency food designed specifically to meet basic nutritional needs, with
significantly lower weight per calorie. Using pre-war consumption models
without adjusting for this fundamental difference creates a misleading
benchmark that inflates the perceived shortfall.
6.5.2. The aid situation in July 2025 according to The Guardian
In the article by The Guardian, the scale of the aid that entered Gaza during the ceasefire in January and February 2025 was first downplayed to such an extent that readers were given the impression that the territory had received only a limited and short-lived relief.
The article stated: "Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows."
That wording is highly misleading. It reduces an exceptionally large
surge of food aid to "just a few weeks of extra aid shipments", even
though the volume delivered during that period was enormous and far above the
levels seen in any of the preceding months or what is common in humanitarian
efforts around the world. It also downplays the broader context. The food
situation in January and February 2025 cannot be understood in isolation from
what entered Gaza immediately before that period.
According to the COGAT data , a total of 41,587 food trucks entered Gaza during 2024, corresponding to an average of 113.9 food trucks per day over the year. In addition, 10,436 food pallets were delivered by airdrop. In addition, 3,271 mixed-aid trucks and 6,334 shelter-equipment trucks, both of which could also include food items, also entered in 2024. Even if only part of those additional deliveries contained food, they still add important context to the total volume of aid entering Gaza before 2025 began.
https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0841ef22-d1f5-43b1-acc1-97a054c9129d/page/UpluD
The month immediately preceding the ceasefire is especially relevant. In December 2024, 3,328 food trucks entered Gaza, corresponding to an average of 107.4 food trucks per day. In addition, there were roughly 22 mixed-aid trucks per day and 20.3 shelter-equipment trucks per day. Even if only a fraction of those non-food categories also carried food items, the total inflow in December remained very substantial. The article’s presentation is therefore misleading not only because it minimizes the January–February surge, but also because it omits the wider pre-March context. This is reinforced visually by the fact that the graph used in the article begins only from March 2025 onward, thereby concealing how much food had already entered Gaza before that date.
This can be seen in the image below :
That omission matters. If the earlier months are excluded, the situation
in mid-2025 naturally appears much worse than it would if the full flow of aid
were shown. But once the full context is restored, the picture changes
significantly. As shown earlier, the amount of food that entered during the
ceasefire alone was enough to cover roughly 8-10 months of food demand, not
even counting pallets by air-drop, mixed aid and shelter equipment and the
higher amounts in December 2024 or the total amount for all of 2024. The
Guardian article instead cut off the graph it presented from March 2025 onward,
thereby hiding from the reader how much food had already entered Gaza before
that date.
This raises an obvious question: why was it not considered important
to show how much food had entered Gaza before March 2025?
The most reasonable explanation to this question is that leaving out that earlier period makes the situation appear far worse to the reader than it actually was. But by excluding that context, the article creates a completely distorted picture of the reality on the ground. The July number also only included data to the 27th, but the total amount for the full month was 53,672 MT worth of food , which equals to an average of 87.1 trucks/day with food for the full month. In addition, the food that went in during May and June was not nothing. It amounts to 29 trucks/day on average in May and 60 trucks/day in June. This gives an monthly average of 59 trucks/day with kcal heavily aid food during these three months (May, June, July 2025), which are likely more than enough when measured together with the huge amount of food that went in in December 2024 and January and February 2025.
All in all, the amount of food that went into Gaza for the first six months of 2025 gave an average for 116 trucks per day with only the food trucks counted, and then at least 87.1 trucks per day went in on average in July which gives an average of 111.8 trucks for the seven month period. This is an monthly average far higher than what entered Gaza before the war, and almost double the amount of food from our estimated demand of 66 trucks/day. This meant that during these seven months, more food went in than was needed for the entire year of 2025. In addition, from that point the amount of aid that entered just became higher and higher, with a total of 6,157 trucks and 2,556 pallets going into Gaza in August 2025 which equals at least 200 trucks/day with food on average.
https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0841ef22-d1f5-43b1-acc1-97a054c9129d/page/UpluD
6.5.3. Starvation deaths according to The Guardian
The article from The Guardian also discussed the number of people starving to death in Gaza in the end of July 2025. They showed the graph of how many people Hamas reported as have died from malnutrition from 20 July to 30 July 2025. This statistics can be seen below, presented in a graph.
But the article by the Guardian didn't question the numbers presented by Hamas, instead they present these numbers as they are proven to be real starvation deaths that all came because of Israel. But to examine how this happened and why we now need to take a look at what actually happened during the months before 20 July to see what the Guardian, and other big media outlets, furthered ignored about what happened during this period.
7. What happened in May to July 2025?
The article by The Guardian, discussed in the last chapter above, was released on the last day of July 2025. In addition to all the influx of aid and the later blockade, in the beginning of the year, a lot of other things also happened the months and weeks that came before this article was published. Let's look at those things in more detail.
7.1. GHF - The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
On 27 May 2025 the United States started the operations of GHF , also backed by Israel, with the goal to further bypass UNRWA, which are mostly staffed by Gazans and heavily infiltrated by Hamas militants . Their goal and strategy was described by the GHF spokesperson Chapin Fay in this CNN interview . In the war in Gaza one of Hamas main revenue sources were to take the free aid that Israel and Egypt provide and reselling it to civilians at high prices, on the streets and in markets. GHF therefor attempted direct distribution to civilians, cutting Hamas out of the control chain. For the first time in the war, this meant Hamas began to lose control of Gaza's food economy, and therefore lost parts of it founding.
7.1.1. How Hamas needed the aid
Because of the blockade that happened in the spring of 2025, Hamas
started to run out of money. In the middle of April,
(WSJ) reported that Hamas struggled to pay its fighters because of this.
When the food then started to go in again by 19 May 2025, just a couple of days
before GHF started their operations, Hamas needed to profit from it badly. It
is easy to see why Hamas didn't like the new GHF system that is meant to get
free food out directly in the hand of the population of GAza, without any
chance of Hamas to profit from it.
Under Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention , humanitarian relief is not unconditional. It allows concern where there are serious reasons to fear that aid may be diverted, misappropriated, or otherwise fail to reach the civilians for whom they are intended. In that sense, the GHF model can be understood as an attempt to create a distribution mechanism that would bring aid more directly into civilian hands while reducing the opportunity for armed actors to profit from it.
7.1.2. GHF operations and data
From 27 May 2025, when GHF began operations , until 9 October 2025, when it ended them on the same day the ceasefire began , GHF delivered 184,530,251 meals via roughly 3,108,304 boxes (the site has been taken down but here is the data one week before). Every GHF box has 19.5 kg of food so let's do some calculations.
- GHF boxes: 3,108,304 boxes x 19.5 kg =
60,608,928 kg
- Gaza demand: 2.1 million people × 0.509 kg
= 1,069,000 kg/day.
- What the GHF food amounts to: Food demand
for 57 out of the 135 days.
So the food that came from GHF sites was enough to cover around 42% of the actual food demand in Gaza during the period it operated. But remember that it was just a compliment to the traditional operations with food trucks, that was still going in during this time. Here is a video of a Gazan opening a GHF box and here is a one hour video that shows the entire process of the food delivery on a GHF site in one long take.
7.1.3. Alleged shootings at GHF sites
What happened when GHF started their operations in May 2025? Already from day one of the opening of these sites, Hamas claimed that IDF did massacre after massacre and shot close to a thousand of Gazans at these sites. If the media was a little more critical about what Hamas told them they would understand that Hamas benefited greatly from people thinking these sites where places of mass murder, with them benefiting from the normal aid system, and would therefore demand video evidence of it happening before publishing these stories as facts. But instead after the whole summer of these shootings being reported over and over again in the media,
this short video is the only video evidence of this taking place and it doesn't actually show anything at all.
Then, IDF released video footage from the site that shows that there was no shooting at all during the time of one of these alleged mass shootings and the only video evidence there is shows Hamas fighters shooting Gazans, trying to stop them from going to these sites. This can all be seen and explained in this great video from The Free Press (FP).
There is really a need to think logically here: if this many mass shootings took place during many months of time on these sites, with hundreds of deaths and thousands injured people , how come there is not a single person in these huge crowds of people who have recorded it happen? It should be clear evidence out there if it was true. Instead what can be seen from these site are people that trust the soldiers there,praising them for the help they bring, people seeking medical help if needed and many woman that wait for the extra aid that is provided after the first load of boxes are taken by the men . It's all in a quite calm and organized manner, that wouldn't been possible if people there was scared of being shot by these soldiers. In addition to all of these Hamas claims, on July 26 2025 a soldier named Anthony "Tony" Aguilar claimed that IDF does war crimes at these GHF aid sites. Then two days he said that a Gazan boy , that he wrongly called Amir at the time, had walked 12 kilometers to reach a GHF aid site, thanked Aguilar for the food, kissed his hand and moments later, was gunned down by the IDF. This story, and many other stories like this, is proven false in my article named: Debunking: "Israel targets children in Gaza". The boy was found still alive by the IDF , proven by a video interview with him and his mother, this video by FP , this long podcast and my side by side comparison (which showed that it was the same boy but with a new haircut).
Debunking: "Israel targets children in Gaza"
We have all heard it many times, the claim that: “Israel targets
children in Gaza.” It is one of the most emotionally powerful accusations made
during the war, and it has spread widely across social...
7.2. Intercepted convoys, looting, and the collapse of distribution security
As GHF started its operation in the end of May 2025, Hamas increasingly lost control over Gaza’s food supply. In response, Hamas also began targeting humanitarian trucks in an attempt to regain influence and prevent civilians from receiving food outside Hamas channels. Between May 19 and August 31 2025, UN tracking data (from their new site that started on 19 May 2025 when Israel restored aid operations) shows that 6,143 UN aid trucks attempted to deliver food and supplies and of those 5,291 were intercepted . "Either peacefully by hungry people or forcefully armed actors, during transit in Gaza".
All of this can be seen on the image below:
During this 3.5 month period only 852 trucks trucks successfully reached their destinations, which was 13% of the trucks in total. Hundreds of videos from Gaza confirm these interceptions, where armed groups hijacked convoys, stole the food to earn from it, or redirected the aid for their own use. Examples of this can be seen in this video , this video, this video of many armed people on one or several trucks with aid. Several sources has also confirmed it to be Hamas, for an example the U.S. Central Command in this video and by this interview by a Gazan. Hamas also control the markets with violence. There are also reports that claims that there is no evidence of Hamas stealing aid, based on anonymous reports . Some people on the internet also claims that the videos showing armed gangs stealing trucks are Israeli backed. But that gang lives Al-Shawka in Rafah , exactly where the truck enterers Gaza and the hijacked trucks can be seen going into Gaza city, where Hamas has full control, sometimes even with UN trucks . In addition, there is no reports of shootings between rival gangs when these interceptions take place which is unlikely if it was Israeli backed gangs behind this.
7.3. Why UN deliveries slowed sharply in July From 1 July 2025, the UN started to ship extremely few trucks with aid into Gaza, and that continued for 3 full weeks exactly when Gaza needed it the most . This happened during the most sensitive time, around 7 weeks after Israel started the aid after the temporary blockage , and right after the twelve day war against Iran where Israel was bombarded with many, many rockets. But because the UN only delivered 329 aid trucks in total , 93% containing food, over these 21 days the situation escalated.
This graph shows the number of trucks (in red) that was collected by the UN each day from the start of the month, to 21 July 2025:
https://app.un2720.org/tracking/collected For comparison, this image show how many of these trucks were intercepted during that period:
A couple of weeks after this period took place, the UN came out with the IPC report that stated this importantly: "...as of 14 July the estimated stockpile of food generated during the ceasefire was depleted". The UN was out of food in their warehouses, right when they stopped deliver food into Gaza. So why did this happen?
7.3.1. The reason why the UN delivered 15 trucks per day with food In an article by Politico , the UN said the following:
“We stand by to deliver at scale, as we did during the last ceasefire
when 600 to 700 truckloads of aid were delivered daily. But for that, we need
the right operational conditions on the ground, including approvals by the
Israeli authorities for the U.N. and our partners to use safe routes within
Gaza that don’t pose security threats.”
In the WFP update from 25 July 2025, the UN also stated this:
"Once food aid is loaded, convoys are typically delayed, waiting up
to 46 hours before receiving final permissions to travel along approved routes
within Gaza. During these delays crowds of hungry people often anticipate the
arrival of our trucks and gather along the expected transport routes which are
too few. Once released, it can take convoys up to 12 hours, on average, to
complete their missions."
Then the same WFP update continued, very importantly:
"Only 60 truck drivers have been vetted and approved by authorities to transport vital food assistance inside Gaza. More are urgently needed". The UN said that only 60 drivers have been approved by the authorities (Hamas), which is a process Israel aren't involved in. Israel only takes the food to the border station inside Gaza , and put on pallets side by side in a huge cargo area , where then organisations like the WFP picks it up, where Gazans are the drivers of the trucks. The amount of aid inside Gaza that was piling up during this period and the following days , was massive. Why did this happen?
7.3.2. That math simply doesn't add up
With each mission taking around 12 hours per round trip, and convoys
waiting up to 46 hours for final permissions. These numbers makes it impossible
for UN to send more than a handful trucks per day, when they only had 60 truck
drivers. The math simply doesn’t add up for UN to be able to deliver more food
than they did during this time. This is why food piled up at holding areas
while distribution inside Gaza slowed down dramatically. It all was because of
the security issues related to aid trucks inside Gaza during this period of
time (87% interceptions) and logistical problems that came from it.
Israel was blamed for delays on roads it is not allowed to patrol, not allowed to escort, and not allowed to secure. This while Hamas controls all internal movement inside Gaza. This made the situation impossible for Israel to do anything about. These problems were on Hamas and the UN, not Israel. But the UN pushed all the blame on Israel, even though the main part of the problem was all the trucks being stolen during all of these months . Then, when the UN were under pressure to start delivering food again , it changed it's story to be able to blame Israel for this even more.
7.3.3. Differences between UN data and COGAT
Now we know that the UN didn't let enough aid enter , through their channels, while Gaza needed it the most. That made their own stockpiles run out on the 14th of July 2025 . But how much food actually entered outside the UN bodies in total? To answer that, let's look at the COGAT numbers , for comparison. Between 2025-07-01 and 2025-07-21, the same period as before, COGAT registered 1,580 food trucks on their site and 420 trucks with shelter equipment (where some can include food). The food trucks equals to an average of 75 trucks per day, including food to the GHF sites, in comparison to the 15 per day that the UN delivered on average during the same period of time. This shows that the GHF sites were very important during this period of time and that CGOAT tried to deliver enough food, reaching a total that was about the same levels as before the war (but with aid food), and higher than the 60 food truck average in June.
When summarizing the full month of July, an average of 87 trucks per day entered Gaza, and most likely a lot more would have entered without the logistical failures by the UN, during the first three weeks. What this shows us is that these failures, that came of internal security threats inside Gaza, had a really bad timing right when Gaza needed the food the most. But all of this also played right in the hands of Hamas that wanted the world to think Israel was starving Gaza, because that is the only way for them to make the Israeli and Egyptian blockade against them illegal by international law, and because they wanted external political pressure against Israel and the GHF sites.
The situation inside Gaza in July 2025 was exactly what Hamas wanted and
they capitalized even more from it, by continuing this pressure with the use of
propaganda lies...
8. Hamas responds with propaganda
As shown above, the UN only shipped an average of 15 trucks of food
during 1-21 July and 12/day during 1-19 July 2025. Then the food started to
re-enter Gaza in much higher volumes again, from that day until today (in April
2026). Right on the same day (19 July 2025) the
Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) wrote a press release on their official Telegram channel that stated the following.
"Press Release: A catastrophic famine and bloody massacres near US
aid centers (death traps) threaten the lives of thousands of citizens in the
Gaza Strip. The sector is experiencing a de facto famine, manifested in a
severe shortage of basic foodstuffs and widespread acute malnutrition, amidst a
complete lack of medical resources to address the consequences of this
disaster. Medical teams have observed a significant increase in mortality rates
resulting from hunger and malnutrition."
"The Ministry of Health warns of an unprecedented health and
humanitarian catastrophe if this international silence continues. It calls upon
the international community, UN agencies, and human rights organizations to
take urgent and effective action to stop these massacres and open humanitarian
corridors for the safe and regular delivery of food, medicine, and fuel."
Except a small two sentence statement the day before , this was the first time their official channel said anything about starvation, famine, or the food situation inside Gaza during many months. But from that day and onward, MoH shared daily updates of the situation. The next day, just as the article by The Guardian reported on the last day in July, MoH claimed 86 deaths from malnutrition in total during the war (incricing by 18 new deaths on that day, from the 68 that came from the 22 months of the war before).
8.1. Cases of starving journalists and children
On 19 July 2025, the very same day that the Gaza Ministry of Health issued its statement about mass starvation , two journalists in Gaza publicly claimed that they themselves were starving and could no longer work because of it. In the days that followed, the world was flooded with dramatic stories about starving journalists and images of allegedly starving children in Gaza.
Major international media outlets repeated these claims as proof of
an Israeli-made famine.
But the journalists who said they were too weak from hunger to work, carry their equipment , walk or even continue living , kept photographing events across large parts of Gaza while appearing physically functional and healthy. The children whose images became global symbols of starvation were, in these cases, suffering from serious pre-existing medical conditions that could produce an appearance similar to starvation, yet this context was omitted from the reporting. In other cases, people with cancer were also depicted as victims of starvation. When the missing context later became clear, many media outlets downplayed or quietly buried their corrections, often through minor notes at the bottom of articles or through much smaller platforms than those used to amplify the original story. In this article, I examine these cases in much greater detail: Apr 17
Debunking Hamas Propaganda lies about the starvation in July 2025 In late July 2025, the world was flooded with dramatic claims about starving journalists and starving children in Gaza. Major international media outlets repeated these stories as proof of...
8.2. What this means for the reported malnutrition deaths
The propaganda pattern described above is also highly relevant when
assessing the reported number of "malnutrition deaths" in Gaza before
and after 20 July 2025. By that date,
the total
number reported was 68
, of whom 59 were said to be children. That pattern had remained broadly
consistent throughout the war. This matters because the cases examined in the
previous section show that Hamas, and large parts of the international media,
were willing to present severely ill children with serious pre-existing medical
conditions as victims of starvation, while omitting the crucial medical context
needed to understand what their condition. Once that pattern is established,
the reported malnutrition figures can no longer simply be taken at face value.
The point is that there is strong reason to question how these deaths were classified and presented. If children suffering from cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, esophageal stenosis, severe neurological damage, muscular disorders, cancer, or other serious conditions were repeatedly used in media reporting as symbols of starvation, then there is every reason to suspect that many of these deaths recorded as malnutrition may in reality have involved underlying illnesses rather than uncomplicated starvation caused solely by lack of food. That interpretation also fits the broader pattern in the numbers. Before 20 July 2025, the reported total remained low and relatively stable over time. In 2023 and 2024 combined, 54 malnutrition-related deaths were reported over 15 months, an average of about 3.6 per month. From January to 19 July 2025, the total rose from 54 to 68, which corresponds to roughly 2 deaths per month. Those are not numbers that demonstrate a mass starvation event across the Gaza Strip. But that was what have been claimed from day one of the war by sources like the UN, NGOs and even IPC.
There are also no reason to assume that the Gaza authorities would systematically distinguish between deaths caused primarily by starvation and deaths involving severe pre-existing illness, age-related decline, cancer, or other medical vulnerabilities worsened by wartime conditions. This is especially important in a setting where official reporting does not clearly separate natural deaths, combatant deaths
, and medically cases from other categories in a way that allows for
meaningful external verification. Taken together, this means the pre-20 July
malnutrition figures should be treated with caution. They do not provide clear
proof of mass starvation. At minimum, they include cases whose medical and
causal background is far more complicated than the public narrative suggested.
What changed after 20 July was the way these numbers began to be reported: the Gaza Ministry of Health’s Telegram channel started issuing daily updates , and both the pace and demographic composition of the reported deaths shifted sharply.
The following weeks the reported total cases rose by: On 19 July 2025: 68 total deaths, 59 children and 9 adults. On 22 August 2025: 273 total deaths, 112 children and 161 adults. In other words, from 20 July to 22 August, 205 new deaths were added in total, of whom 53 were children and 152 were adults. That means children accounted for only about 26% of the newly reported deaths during that later period, compared with about 87% of the total before 20 July. That shift is highly unusual. Gaza’s population is roughly half children and half adults , and in genuine hunger crises children are normally far more vulnerable to death from malnutrition than adults. Yet in Gaza, the reported pattern suddenly moved in the opposite direction.
In Somalia, for example,during the 2010–2012 famine, a very large share of malnutrition-related deaths involved young children. In Gaza, by contrast, the post-20 July figures shifted toward overwhelmingly adult deaths, despite Gaza having one of the youngest populations in the world and very high birth rates, including during the war. What this shows us is likely signs of manipulation, with many combatants and natural deaths hidden in these starvation numbers.That issue requires closer examination and will be addressed in the next part of this article series, which focuses more specifically on the food situation in Gaza during the second half of summer 2025.
9. Conclusion
The starvation narrative in Gaza became dominant because misleading
numbers, selective reporting, emotional imagery, and repeated slogans were
allowed to shape public perception. The most important source of confusion was
the repeated use of truck figures that did not actually measure Gaza’s real
food needs. Total aid flows were repeatedly confused with food supply,
working-day averages were presented as if they were calendar-day norms, and
mixed cargo was discussed as though it consisted primarily of food. From there,
the narrative was reinforced by incomplete datasets, poor media reporting, and
a persistent refusal to distinguish between very different categories of
evidence.
Once the idea took hold that Gaza needed 500–600 trucks a day to avoid
starvation, every lower number could be framed as proof of famine. Once images
of severely ill children were presented without context, they became instant
symbols of hunger. Once those stories were published by major outlets, later
corrections made little difference. The lesson is that the famine narrative was
built through a long chain of distortions, omissions, and emotionally powerful
but often misleading representations. That is why the issue should be
approached with much more skepticism than it usually has been. In a war defined
by propaganda, the first duty is not to repeat the most powerful image, but to
verify what it actually shows.
The next part of this article will later clarify what happened in the
second half of the summer 2025 in Gaza, with the raising aid and IPC famine
report examined in detail, and later. While I'm working on the next part, my
old threads in this topic can be found below.
Thank you for reading!
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