Resources

Teach me Your way, O Lord, lead me in a straight path because of my oppressors. Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes, for false witnesses rise up against me, breathing out violence.” (Psalm 27:11-12)

The world is abuzz with allegations about Israel creating a famine in Gaza. Photos of innocent children who look like they’re starving to death have gone viral on media venues from the New York Times, to TV stations around the globe, social media platforms, and even some legacy, evangelical Christian outlets.

What is really happening in Gaza?

To answer the question, and to provide you with content you can use to counter anti-Israel propaganda in your spheres of influence, I spent many hours searching for credible, first-hand reports by journalists, military experts, physicians and public officials. Finding objective, verifiable information was a challenge. Search engine algorithms are heavily biased, beyond all reason, in favor of Hamas. Online sources are saturated with undocumented, or falsely documented, fake news aimed at castigating Israel. But truth always emerges, eventually.

I have written here, for your use, a brief FAQ summary of my findings. To keep this article to a readable length, the FAQ section is necessarily oversimplified and lacking in nuance. It is followed by a reprint of a well written, reader-friendly news article on the subject. Lastly, I have listed some additional key points, quotes and information sources verifying or documenting the content of this article.

As you read, please keep in mind that I do not suggest Israel is free of any wrongdoing in the matter. I do most strongly suggest there is another, rarely heard but honest and objective, perspective on the so-called famine besides that which is commonly reported.

FAQ SUMMARY: FIVE FAST FACTS (source documents follow)

1. Is there crisis-level hunger or famine in Gaza?

On August 10, PM Netanyahu announced in a press conference that there is no hunger in Gaza. Unequivocally, this was a misstatement. There is hunger in Israel; there is hunger in America; there is hunger around the world. And there is hunger in Gaza. For a relatively small part of the population, that hunger is at a crisis level. Unfortunately, there is inevitable hunger in any war zone. But there is no famine or widespread starvation in Gaza.

2. Why is there some crisis-level hunger in Gaza?

Hamas has intentionally engineered and weaponized hunger to create a situation in which it could gain global sympathy for a Palestinian state and blame Israel for the disaster. Food and other humanitarian aid sent to Gaza has been sufficient to feed the entire civilian population. However, Hamas hijacks nearly all the aid, brutally murdering Gazans and any others who resist them. Hamas feeds its own operatives and co-operatives well, then sells the rest of the aid in black markets. Those markets resell the aid at exorbitant prices few civilians can afford.

The UN is officially in charge of distributing most of the food and other aid. Hamas, however, regularly attacks UN aid workers unless they cooperate with Hamas. Civilian gangs and mobs can also turn deathly violent in the process of distribution. As a result of the chaos, the UN has failed to deliver hundreds of thousands of tons of donated food and other aid. Many of those donations are still sitting in the desert as I write, rotting in the summer heat.

3. What about children in Gaza starving to death?

Hamas takes photos and stages videos of sick, scarey-skinny children to use as propaganda tools against Israel. According to physicians who have carefully examined the photos and videos, nearly all these children suffer from preexisting, congenital diseases such as cerebral palsy, brittle bone disease, or other conditions having nothing to do with hunger. Their siblings or parents appear in many of the same photos, all of them looking to be of normal or above normal weight. Some of the supposedly famished children photographed were recently treated by Israeli doctors who have the medical records on file, documenting severe disease unrelated to any food shortage.

4. How can the famine be fake, with so many journalists and UN officials reporting it?

Journalists in Gaza who do not report in an anti-Israel manner consistent with the Hamas narrative are expelled from Gaza or find their lives threatened. Reporters say they are forced to work and cooperate with Hamas, even if they represent formerly respectable, legacy media such as the Associated Press. Any non-Hamas aligned journalist can safely enter Gaza only under very tight Israeli security. (Israeli security resources for this purpose are almost nonexistent due to ongoing wars on many fronts. The country now recognizes those resources must somehow be provided in the near future.)

UN and other international aid workers reporting on conditions in Gaza are given data by Hamas. They are not allowed to collect their own, independent and objective studies.

5. What do American officials say about hunger in Gaza?

American officials witnessing or carefully and objectively studying the situation overwhelmingly agree with Israeli officials that, to the extent crisis level hunger exists in Gaza, Hamas has intentionally created it and intentionally maintains it.

Among other things, officials point to recent photos and video footage of Israeli hostages reduced to skin and bones, while in the presence of overweight Hamas operatives and even obese Gaza civilians.

IF YOU CAN READ ONLY ONE ARTICLE, PLEASE READ THIS

Below is a reprint of a reader-friendly article by a respected investigative journalist who is neither Israeli, nor Jewish, nor evangelical Christian; and therefore, is less likely to be accused of inherent bias. (This article is reprinted for educational purposes only and is not intended to generate any pecuniary or other benefit to Light of Zion or to me personally.)

Marc A. Thiessen, “Hunger in Gaza has many authors, but Israel isn’t one of them,” The Washington Post, 7 August 2025.

“Israel is doing something no nation has ever done: feeding the population of the force that attacked it.

“On Tuesday [August 5, 2025] Israel delivered 1,829,520 meals to suffering Gazans through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a nongovernmental organization created this year, with U.S. support, to replace UNRWA, the corrupt, Hamas-infiltrated U.N. relief agency. That is enough to feed nearly the entire Gazan population. Indeed, since May 26, the foundation reports that it has distributed at least 108 million meals in Gaza. According to the Israel Defense Forces’ Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Israel has facilitated the delivery of almost 1.9 million tons of international humanitarian aid to Gaza since the start of the war by land, sea and air. …

“Far from deliberate starvation in Gaza, Israel is doing something no nation has ever done, or even been expected to do: Feed the population of the aggressor force that attacked it while the war is still going on.

‘There is no historical precedent for a military providing the level of direct aid to an enemy population that Israel has provided to Gaza,’ John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, recently pointed out. The United States did not feed Germany and Japan while the war was going on; we forced their armies to surrender and then fed their populations.

“Today, despite having been defeated militarily, Hamas refuses to surrender. Hamas fights on because it clearly doesn’t care about the suffering of the people of Gaza. Indeed, the suffering is central to Hamas’s strategy of survival, which is to weaponize images of Palestinian misery to build international pressure on Israel to stop its military campaign before Hamas is destroyed.

“Unfortunately, that strategy is working. We see its success in the coverage by Western media outlets, such as the New York Times, which recently published a front-page photo of a Gazan mother holding her emaciated child to illustrate the suffering Israel was supposedly inflicting. It turned out the boy was suffering from pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and muscle development, the Times later acknowledged in an editor’s note — though it continued to report he ‘suffers from severe malnutrition.’ Of course, they failed to show his healthy, well-fed older brother, perhaps because his inclusion would have undermined that assertion.

“We see the success of Hamas’s strategy in the response of governments like France, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Spain and Norway, which have declared, in response to the international outcry Hamas has generated, that they will recognize a ‘State of Palestine’ — thus rewarding Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and its refusal to release Israeli hostages.

“This success is why Hamas is determined to stop Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from delivering aid by systematically stealing it. The United Nations reports that, from May 19 to August 4, a total of 2,545 trucks carrying aid entered Gaza. Of those, 2,310 — or about 90 percent — were ‘intercepted’ (either by hungry people or armed actors) and 31,113 tons of aid was taken. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) explained on the Senate floor, Hamas resells looted supplies on the black market allowing it ‘to rake in more than half-a-billion dollars in profit — profits that fund Hamas’s campaign of terror against Israel and its own people.’ Meanwhile hundreds of trucks have sat inside Gaza filled with undelivered aid, because the U.N. wouldn’t distribute it — and refused to let the Gaza Humanitarian Fund distribute it. Whose fault is that?

“Who else is responsible for Gaza’s suffering? Its neighbors. The normal way to get humanitarian relief to civilians in wartime is allow them to leave the conflict zone as refugees. For example, there are more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe. Poland has taken in nearly 1 million, while Germany has accepted 1.2 million. During the civil war in Syria, more than 4.2 million civilians fled that conflict, taken in by Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other neighboring countries.”…

Why are most Gazans staying put in a hostile, outdoor prison? Is it really because they don’t want to leave their so-called homeland?

… “They [other Arab states] claim it is because Israel might not allow them [the Gazans] to return. But the real reason is that they [other Arab states] do not want to import Gaza’s problems.

“Of course, there is a policy of deliberate starvation in Gaza. It is being carried out by Hamas, which last week released photos of two emaciated Israeli hostages. The brother of one of the hostages told the U.N. Security Council this week, ‘As my younger brother, a living skeleton, was forced to speak and dig his grave, the chubby and well-fed hand of a Hamas terrorist entered the frame. Suddenly, Hamas confirmed what we have known for months — the terrorists have plenty of food. The only ones starving in Hamas’s tunnels are the hostages’.”

“To lay the blame for this situation at Israel’s feet, rather than on Hamas, requires a stunning level of moral blindness — which apparently is plentiful when it comes to what is happening in Gaza.”

As you might expect, Mr. Thiessen’s article has been heavily criticized.

KEY POINTS WITH INFORMATION SOURCES CITED BELOW

• The UN admits it did not deliver 87-90 percent of food and aid on trucks Israel allowed into Gaza since the start of the war. This has been due to chaos in the area and threats by Hamas, including placing bounties on the heads of any aid worker who would attempt to deliver aid instead of turning it over to Hamas.

• COGAT figures indicate that 1.8 million tons of food and other aid entered Gaza from the start of the war to June 2025. (As of mid-August, the amount is estimated to be 2 million tons.) Food donations have been enough for over 3,000 calories per person per day, excluding food allotted for known terrorists. Many healthy adults in the West consume far fewer calories.

• President Trump and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff have concluded, based on the hunger situation and lack of sincere interest in making a deal for peace, that Hamas wants the people of Gaza to die. Bear in mind that just days after Hamas declared war on Israel on October 7, 2023, its leader Ismail Haniyah proclaimed the blood of women, children and elderly Gazans must be shed in the fight against Israel.

• Medical analysis reveals most visual evidence of supposedly starving children are victims of congenital disease.

• Donations to Samaritan’s Purse and other charitable organizations have been stolen by Hamas, having been seen and photographed in Gaza marketplaces for sale at prices unaffordable to civilians in need.

• In-depth investigations reveal a significant gap between the number of deaths reportedly caused by malnutrition and the number of such cases that were actually documented and publicly identified in Palestinian media and social networks. The Gaza Health Ministry stopped releasing individual names of the dead, as it had previously done, and began claiming large numbers en masse for consumption by the international media.

• An article entitled, ”UN-Backed Famine Watchdog Quietly Changed Standards, Easing Way To Declare Famine in Gaza” in The Washington Free Beacon, dated August 12, 2025, states as follows: “The UN secretly changed the criteria for defining hunger in conflict areas, in order to allow a declaration of hunger in Gaza. In the report “The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification,” published on July 29, the criterion requiring that 30% of children in a conflict area be malnourished to declare hunger was reduced to only 15%. In other words, the criterion for Gaza was cut by 50% compared to other conflict areas in order to allow a declaration of hunger in Gaza.”

• An AP post of July 28, 2025 reportedly states the following: Hamas is stealing most of the food and aid delivered into Gaza; all health workers in Gaza reporting on deaths, disease and starvation are employed by Hamas; and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) ceased operations temporarily due to the violently chaotic situation in Gaza. By August 1, 2025, however, the GHF had delivered over 90 million meals. (A related article by The Washington Free Beacon dated August 12, 2025, noted that five individuals posing as World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers who were killed by Israeli soldiers were not aid WCK workers at all, but armed Hamas terrorists who commandeered the aid, WCK uniforms and a WCK vehicle.)

Information sources for the points above include:

COGAT [Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories] posts on X dated August 11, 12, 13 2025; Dan Diker, “Weaponizing Starvation: Exposing Hamas’s Food Warfare,” Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, August 12, 2025 — very highly recommended; Rachel Wolf, “Terror in Gaza:Hamas offers bounties to kill US and aid workers,” Fox News, June 28, 2025; Andrew Fox, “Who is really to blame for Gazans going hungry?” Spiked, August 12, 2025; Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, “Hamas Wants Gaza to Starve,” The Atlantic, July 31, 2025; Gerald Baker, “Hamas Starves Jews and Palestinians and Israel Gets Blamed,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2025; “Former AP reporter on media bias toward Israel after October 7, All Israel News, August 11, 2025; Nava Freiberg, “Netanyahu: Israel allowed in aid throughout war, otherwise there would be no Gazans,” The Times of Israel, July 27, 2025; Maayan Hoffman,“Inside Kerem Shalom, the truth about Gaza’s ‘famine’,” All Israel News, August 10, 2025; “Faking a famine: politicization and propaganda,” Center for Medical Integrity Report, August 8, 2025.

(Please note that I do not have the resources to check the veracity of every source cited in this article. I myself am unable to enter Gaza or interview reporters and officials who have personally witnessed facts on the ground. I merely cite information sources I prayerfully discern and deem to be reliable and credible based on reputation, knowledge of the source, my familiarity with research tools, and the like.)

Quotes posted on X by US Ambassador Mike Huckabee after investigating and visiting Gaza:

“The food is there. It’s not getting in, and when it does get in, even by the UN’s own assessment of it, 87 percent is stolen, looted or taken directly off the trucks [by Hamas] in what the UN euphemistically calls “self-distribution.” (August 5, 2025)

“If Israel is committing genocide, it’s really bad at it…Set the record straight on Israel and what POTUS is doing to stop the REAL genocide pushed by Hamas.” (August 3, 2025)

“This morning I joined Steve Witkoff for a visit to Gaza to learn the truth about aid sites. We received briefings … and spoke to folks on the ground. Gaza Humanitarian Fund is delivering more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat! … They [the international media] still quote Gaza Health Ministry as if it’s legit. Gaza Health Ministry is HAMAS!” (August 2, 2025)

Amit Segal Interview

Amit Segal, one of Israel’s most respected conservative investigative journalists, was interviewed by Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, a leftist publication, on July 30, 2025. The article is rather cynically entitled, “How the Israeli Right explains the aid disaster it created.”

Mr. Segal states there is some hunger in Gaza, clarifying it is due to the purposeful actions of Hamas. He points out that American news outlets base their reports on Hamas sources. “They rely heavily on stringers in Gaza that have two options: either report what Hamas wants, or die.”

Segal lauds the unique success of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) despite the dangers it has faced. He goes on to say, “The UN and Hamas are on a campaign to stop the GHF because they want a monopoly on distribution in order to weaponize a fake famine against Israel.” Sadly, Hamas murdered innocent GHF workers who refused to cooperate with them.

Segal notes, “Israel is the only country on earth that provides humanitarian aid to the enemy in the middle of a war. There is not a single country that ever did it.” His other comments reiterate matters already noted above in this article.

Friends, I hope this article provides you with basic information you might need to respond to some of the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish accusations of famine you may encounter. I also hope it better equips you to pray for God’s merciful intervention in this egregiously tragic situation, for both Gazans and Israelis.

If you’ve read my books, you know that outlandish lies about Jews have been around since biblical times.”A lie repeated often enough is believed to be true,” declared Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda in World War II.

Through the centuries, many committed Christians have believed devilishly absurd lies about the Jews. Historically, these lies often flare up and assume new, ghoulish forms just before a breakthrough of God’s Kingdom. For that, we pray in faith as we lean ever more deeply into Him.