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Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
@JeremyKonyndyk
Aug 22 • 15 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
For months, folks on this website have pushed a set of "gotcha" tropes to debunk the existence of famine in Gaza.

In fact they are mostly debunking their own credibility on famine dynamics.

As we await tomorrow's IPC report, here is a pre-buttal 🧵of some of those tropes.
Most of this denialism comes from armchair experts who have never worked on hunger emergencies.

FWIW, I directed USG famine prevention efforts for:

- South Sudan 2013-14
- Yemen 2015-16
- Ethiopia 2016
- Nigeria 2016

Plus a lot of smaller ones.

On to the gotchas...
Gotcha 1: This starving kid is next to a parent who isn't starving! Clearly a ruse!

Why it’s BS: The nutritional needs of growing children make them far more vulnerable to starvation than adults. They invariably starve earlier.

Good overview here: telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…Image
Gotcha 2: this starving person clearly has a pre-existing condition. Not real starvation!

(This one makes me crazy)

Why it’s BS: People with complicating ailments are always more susceptible to earlier starvation.

This is a SIGN of famine onset, not a rebuttal of it.
Gotcha 3: there is food in the market! Some restaurant is open!

Why it’s BS: Famine isn't the universal absence of food; it's when adequate food is out of reach for much of the population. In every famine ever, some people could afford food even while others couldn’t.
...trope 3 cont'd

In Gaza, food prices have spiked massively. That tells you that a) some food must still be present, but b) it is priced wildly far beyond what most people can afford.
Gotcha 4: Plenty of food has gone in! Hamas is just stealing it.

Why it’s BS (1): There is not, in fact, plenty of food. Nothing in March/April, and only a trickle since.

GHF provides a pittance and it’s inaccessible to most, especially the vulnerable.
Why it's BS (2): Israel has supplied NO credible evidence of substantial Hamas theft of UN or NGO food aid.

In fact, ex US ambassador Jack Lew (hardly an Israel skeptic) writes that the Israelis *never* raised these concerns with him - even privately.
foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/ho…Image
Gotcha 5: There's food but the UN refuses to distribute it! (Israel is now importing rightwing influencers to promote this lie)

Why it's BS: Israel tightly controls every UN truck that moves within Gaza. Their own policies prevent the UN from delivering! apnews.com/article/aid-ga…Image
Image
Gotcha 6: You've been warning of famine since last year - you’re just crying wolf.

Why it’s BS: Each time things spiraled last year, Israel pulled back from the tipping point. (We wrote a whole report on this)

This time, they didn’t pull back. refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Image
...trope 6 cont'd

And by keeping many Gazans teetering back and forth at the edge of famine since spring 2024, Israeli policy has demolished whatever coping mechanisms people had left.

That policy laid the fuse, and the blockade in March/April set it alight.
Gotcha 7: The IPC changed the goalposts! They used a different malnutrition standard for Gaza!

Why it's BS: This just shows a basic ignorance of famine thresholds.

The last IPC report used a 15% MUAC threshold for famine-level malnutrition - in line with IPC guidance. Image
MUAC is often used if good weight-for-height data cannot be obtained. The MUAC threshold is lower than WfH because they manifest at different levels within the same pop'n.

This approach has been used by the IPC for years, including in Sudan, Somalia.
reliefweb.int/report/somalia…
(The Free Beacon did a whole piece using this claim to debunk the last IPC analysis - and the entire thing rests on this armchair misreading of IPC guidance) ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user…
Bottom line: all of these tropes are classic famine-denial disinfo.

As Alex de Waal wrote here, we see this around most famines, especially as the situation approaches visible collapse.

Don’t fall for it.

/end
observer.co.uk/news/opinion-a…

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More from @JeremyKonyndyk

Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 10
Always illuminating to check whether accounts using other crises to downplay Gaza have *ever* otherwise shown concern about those crises.

Almost invariably: nope. Just a clumsy, cynical attempt to dunk on Gaza activism.

Let's dive into the levels of bad faith at play here:
🧵
First, the receipts:

@IsraelMFA has NEVER before shown concern about the humanitarian crises in Sudan: x.com/search?q=sudan…

or Afghanistan: x.com/search?q=afgha…

or DR Congo: x.com/search?q=congo…

or Yemen: x.com/search?q=yemen…

It just wants to use them as props.
That's pretty grotesque in its own right.

But now let's check how much the government of Israel has donated to those same crises over the past few years.

From everything I can find, the answer seems to be:

*zero*
Read 10 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 29
The world's famine alert system is warning us – in the starkest possible terms – that any remaining window to avert mass starvation deaths in Gaza is about to close.

A quick dive into what the report tells us:
This confirms what media reports (and frankly anyone with eyes) could see over the past week: a famine unfurling in Gaza.

While this is not (yet) a formal famine declaration, it signals that one is likely coming.

Importantly, formal declarations ALWAYS come after the fact.
Famine declaration is a lagging indicator.

By the time data can be collected proving the presence of famine conditions, those conditions have invariably been in place for some time.

In the 2011 Somalia famine, half of the 260K people lost had already died prior to declaration.
Read 14 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 26
Netanyahu has used aid diversion claims as pretext for massive obstruction of aid to Gaza.

Now we learn the IDF had briefed his team that these claims were false (as aid groups have long argued).

This constitutes further evidence he is using starvation as a weapon of war.
🧵
Humanitarian groups have long denied that their aid is being diverted at any significant scale.

My organization dug into this last year and found no evidence for the Israeli govt claims. refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Image
US envoy David Satterfield - a savvy, hard-nosed diplomat and no one's idea of a bleeding heart - has consistently said the same.
Read 6 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 24
As a longtime humanitarian who has battled famines and hunger crises, I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality.

A thread on famine momentum, famine response, and what it means for Gaza today.
The latest reporting shows telltale signs of rapidly accelerating mortality - the kind of classic famine scenario we know from places like Sudan or Somalia.

Barring a massive reversal of Israeli policy, there is a little standing in the way of total collapse.
Throughout last year Gaza ebbed and flowed at the brink of famine, but never passed the tipping point.

Israeli aid obstruction kept Palestinians perpetually underfed but always relented just enough to avoid mass hunger mortality, as we wrote last Sept:
refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Read 14 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jun 4
For days, GHF and its defenders tried to "debunk" the massacre claims by arguing "but this didn't happen *at* the GHF sites."

As we know, the people killed were in the crowds walking long distances through IDF perimeters TO REACH THOSE VERY SITES.

Which GHF now...admits.
The whole episode says a lot about the sincerity of whoever is pulling the strings at GHF.

First instinct is to put out a gaslighting press release denying the massacre reports, while pretending that whatever happens outside their perimeter has nothing to do with them.
Only after *another* massacre (which they also initially try to debunk) does GHF belatedly acknowledge that...maybe...there are some issues with an aid model that forces huge crowds of hungry people to cross long distances and then clusters them along IDF force positions.
Read 4 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 27
Seasoned humanitarians do not operate this way because it's a terribly risky and ineffective way to deliver aid.

Quick 🧵 on what seems to have gone wrong, and why nothing about today's events was surprising.

(subtitle: humanitarians know stuff, actually)
One thing that relief workers learn early is that managing desperate crowds is TOUGH.

So you generally try to deliver aid in a way that avoids drawing more people than you can manage and serve at a given site.

More sites = smaller crowds = manageable distribution. Not this: Image
The GHF model is the total inverse of that.

Rather than dispersing people across many sites, GHF concentrates them at very few sites with very grandiose aspirations of serving huge numbers.

As evidenced by today's chaos, GHF had no plan for what that would mean in practice.
Read 15 tweets

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