STARVATION EVALUATION

Aug 27
12 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.

— George Orwell, February 1945

The truth is complicated, difficult and not always flattering: but the truth is essential.

— Yuval Noah Harari, July 2026

When you are told something like "famine experts raise alarm," it is Alex de Waal to whom folks are commonly referring. He's an anthropologist who studied famine in Sudan in the '80s, starvation as a weapon of war in the '90s, and who helped get food-related crimes penned into international humanitarian law.

This famine expert sat down with Owen Jones, the UK-based podcaster/substacker with a million subscribers who seeks to “take on the mainstream media” (but who, of course, is reliably just as bad or worse). Their January 23rd, 2024 episode was titled “Israel's Lies Over Its Gaza Famine Exposed” and sought to have de Waal get to the bottom of the situation — one almost unanimously assessed as inevitably resulting in unimaginable numbers of fatalities, especially children due to insufficient calories and nutrition.

THE POD

Over half an hour, de Waal offered a series of warnings and predictions about mass starvation in Gaza, roughly three months after the full-scale ground invasion of Gaza on October 27th, 2023 (in response to the full-scale ground invasion and rocket attacks against Israel two weeks earlier). The senior activist and academic prefaces the whole conversation with five minutes about starvation as a time-tested weapon of war. Therein, he clearly wishes listeners to equate Israelis under Netanyahu to Germans under Hitler or perhaps merely Russians under Stalin. To get there, he notes Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (the book that coined the term genocide) and that the author devoted more ink to starvation as an instrument of extermination than to killing squads and gas chambers. The starvation scholar wants you to understand that the preferred method of killing by the Nazis during the Final Solution was “something not widely recognized, called the Hunger Plan” aimed at starving “30 million so-called useless eaters from Eastern Europe.” Food restriction was only abandoned, he says, when it was deemed too slow and Germans were then forced to resort to swifter means (slaughtering their scapegoats like animals, just as in the good ol' days); and, we are told, this approximates what Israel has been up to for a generation and is up to now in Gaza. From there he talks about the conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Congo and says that the vast majority of those who perish in conflict die not from violence but “secondary causes”, that the “great majority of those who die are not combatants but are overwhelmingly children”, and that “in any famine, half to two-thirds are children, usually children under five.” After setting their lugubrious stage the podly pair move on to Gaza:

11:36 - Jones and de Waal suggest that the Gaza Strip has been under total siege for nearly 20 years and that, prior to the war, Gazans were so “nutritionally deprived” that the situation should be considered deliberate, and thus criminal, starvation (and, safe to say, an intent and effort toward genocide).

14:37 - We are told that things became explicitly unlawful after October 7th, according to de Waal, where “the war crime of starvation perpetrated at scale … brought something that we have not seen … I have not observed or studied in my 40 or so years of looking at famine and starvation crimes.”

16:48 - “Gaza today, over the last few months, is a phenomenon that we have not seen at this scale with this intensity, with these calamitous outcomes, for 75 years.”

21:03 - Even the “immediate cessation of hostilities” cannot stop these deaths, mainly of children, “and those deaths are on Israel.”

22:50 - Deaths from disease and starvation deaths “will soon exceed those directly from violence.”

30:10 - “The military campaign is creating starvation, whether deliberately or recklessly,” requiring full-spectrum humanitarian operation to prevent “a catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen certainly in my lifetime.”

SINCE THEN

Though all this looked silly to me at the time, and little better than centuries-old blood libel (he's ignoring all of history while pretending to capture and distill it and states that innumerable child deaths that have not happened are already on Israel, not may be or will be), we can now fairly evaluate de Waal’s insinuations and assertions, look at his own sources and others offered, inspect the offerings of regular Gazans just getting on with their lives, and from there attempt to determine what actually transpired.

In June of 2024, five months after de Waal predicted we would see the start of an unstoppable tidal wave of famine-related mass casualties that would continue long after the conflict, and eight months after Israel shut the border, rolled its army in, and began levelling most of the buildings in the region, the Famine Review Committee of the IPC asserted that the famine claims were “not plausible,” and “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.”