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After several months of warnings that a “famine is imminent” in the Gaza Strip, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) walked back its claim in its latest report issued on Tuesday.
“The available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring,” the IPC, a group comprised of a partnership between humanitarian groups, food experts and the United Nations, reported in a snapshot published on June 25. The group is funded by several Western countries, including Canada, the European Union and the United States.
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“The IPC acute food insecurity analysis conducted in February 2024 projected that Famine would likely occur in the northern governorates (of Gaza) by the end of May, based on the assumption that conflict would persist with the same intensity and humanitarian access would remain very low,” the report states.
Part of IPC’s revision stems from its earlier reliance on “assumptions and inference” to “address major gaps in publicly accessible evidence,” the body acknowledged earlier this month.
“While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in IPC generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population.”
David Adesnik, a senior fellow and director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said that IPC’s changing tune is “one of the greatest slanders of the last eight months,” referring to the beginning of hostilities in October when Hamas invaded Israel.
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“After months of hearing that Israel was blocking the delivery of sufficient aid to Gaza, we now see that Israeli authorities facilitated a massive increase in shipments of both aid and commercial goods, alleviating shortages in Gaza while Israeli forces continued to prosecute the war against Hamas,” Adesnik said in an email to National Post. “This is a decisive rebuke to malicious claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza.”
International media reports have heavily relied upon IPC projections in their reporting of the conflict. Several reports published in March, ahead of Israel’s military operations in Rafah, warned that the situation was “catastrophic” based on IPC’s forecasts. “Over one million Gazans are estimated to be starving,” the Wall Street Journal reported in mid-March, citing IPC’s earlier report at the time. Similar sentiments were echoed by the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), which warned that northern Gaza was beset by a “full-blown famine” in May.
Such allegations, in turn, framed the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in May, which accused both of leveraging the “starvation of civilians as a method of war.”
A June study by academics at Columbia University found “sufficient amounts of food are being supplied into Gaza” and dismissed accusations of Israel depriving Palestinians of food as “a myth.”
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