¹ The IPC “famine” designation for Gaza City relied heavily on the claimed July surge in “malnutrition-related” deaths.
However a careful analysis of the MoH’s own numbers shows that this "surge" was a complete fabrication. 🧵 ² About a week ago, I showed that the Gaza MoH’s own data contains no trace of a “rapid increase” or “acceleration” — let alone “exponential growth” — in malnutrition-related deaths.⏬

https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1961006970330349577

¹ Unpacking IPC’s Response to Criticism — Part 1 🧵

As I wrote yesterday, the IPC admitted that the malnutrition rates charts they used as key "evidence" for allegedly rapidly deteriorating situation and breach of the famine threshold weren’t based on the data shared in the annex of their report.
Now they claim it was all based on a completely different dataset, supposedly received on Aug 12 — but whose very existence they never bothered to disclose until now.⏬ ² I must say: if this were a submission to a serious scientific journal, an admission like this -"oops, we forgot to include the actual dataset our analysis is based on" - especially if made only after people started pointing the mismatch, would trigger an immediate retraction.
But this is IPC we’re talking about, so the regular scientific standards clearly do not apply.⏬

¹ The deeper I dig into IPC’s August famine report, the worse it gets.
Turns out that the July data fudge wasn’t the only fabrication, but they also tried to retroactively rewrite what supposedly happened in May and early June.🧵 ² Just look at IPC’s malnutrition chart for Gaza Governorate.
See the part for May and early June?
A neat downward slope, as if rates were falling and things improving.
Wonderful, right?

WAIT, WHAT?!⏬

¹ Yesterday I exposed two scandalous facts - also noted in Israel’s official response to the IPC "famine" designation:
1⃣ FRC ignored half of July’s malnutrition data
2⃣ Full data showed rates under 15%

In response, IPC apologists tried to rationalize this omission. 🧵

https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1959065766508081322

² Jeremy Konydyk here conveniently ignores that half the July dataset was tossed aside, and responds only to the 2nd point:

“Yes, the full July average is under 15%. But if you split the month, the 2nd half shows an upward trend and breaches 15%.”

https://x.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1959066258340487412

¹ The biggest problem with the Gaza City bogus "famine" designation isn’t that IPC used MUAC or the 15% threshold.

The real scandal is that Gaza City’s malnutrition rate in July never actually crossed 15%.

This is huge - yet it’s barely being talked about.🧵 ² IPC claimed Gaza Governorate crossed the famine threshold with ~16% malnutrition, but this figure was based on only half of July’s data (7,519 kids).

However, the full July dataset (15,749 kids), published on Aug 6, showed 12.2% rate - well below the 15% cutoff.⏬

¹ Did IPC really change the rules for determining famine in Gaza, as @FreeBeacon recently claimed?

Yes and no.

No: They didn’t introduce a new malnutrition indicator or cut the famine threshold in half.

Yes: They significantly lowered the evidentiary bar in practice. 🧵 ² Let’s start with the “no” - contrary to the article’s claim, neither the use of mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) to measure Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) nor the 15% GAM-by-MUAC threshold is unique to Gaza.

Both appear in the 2019 IPC manual and have been used in other IPC analyses, including the latest for South Sudan.

However, the way they’ve been applied in Gaza diverges significantly from what IPC methodology requires.⏬

¹ A couple of weeks ago, I promised a deep-dive into the recent study led by @Michael_Spagat, which claimed to estimate violent and non-violent deaths in Gaza since the war began, based on a survey conducted by @KShikaki.
It took more time than I expected — because once I began examining the survey itself, it became clear that the obvious methodological flaws I noticed while reading the preprint paled in comparison to the can of worms lurking in the raw data. 🧵 ² The study's core idea is simple: survey 2,000 households, ask how many lived there before the war and how many died since, then scale up to estimate population-wide deaths.
It's a standard method used in mortality surveys — with one crucial caveat common to all of them:

Your estimate is only as good as your sample.

But while the authors did claim they used "a representative sample of 2,000 Gazan households," and laid out a sampling methodology for guaranteeing representability, in reality their sample turned out to be an absolute mess. ⏬

¹ Another fake has just landed, claiming that “Harvard study finds Israel ‘disappeared’ nearly 400,000 (or 377,000) Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children.”

Where does this bullshit-du-jour come from? 🧵 ² This outlandish claim is allegedly based on a paper by Israeli researcher Yaakov Garb, uploaded on June 3, 2025, to Harvard Dataverse:


Which brings us to lie #1 ⏬dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?…

Still waiting the full IPC analysis that's expected to be published in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, here are just three quick examples of how they misrepresent their own findings in the "Special Snapshot" released a few day ago:

1) They claim that "half a million people (one in five) facing starvation", but if you read the report, it turns out that ""half a million" (or 469,500, to be exact) is a *projection* for the number of people "who will likely experience catastrophic food insecurity" ⏬ 2) Similarly, the number of malnutrition cases listed in the "Current Acute Malnutrition" section is a *projection* for the coming year, not the actual number of currently diagnosed cases. ⏬

¹ Yet another "Lancet study" about the death toll in Gaza is making rounds in the media, and unlike several previous "studies", this one has been published as a regular article, rather than a 'Correspondence' (which is not peer-reviewed).

Unfortunately, this doesn’t change the fact that, yet again, @TheLancet published agenda-driven pseudoscientific speculation that, under any other circumstances, would've never passed peer review due to numerous methodological problems and omissions, bordering on outright fraud.

A thread. 🧵 ² Let’s start with the most glaring omission:

The authors tested four different models for estimating mortality, but highlighted only the one that produced the second-highest estimate - over 64K deaths – which is also the number cited in the media.

However, one of the alternative models they tested produced a much lower estimate— about 51K deaths - but this was only mentioned in passing, as if it were some minor detail.

The major discrepancies between different models were neither mentioned in the abstract, nor discussed in the body of the article, as one would normally expect to see in any serious scientific work published in a respectable journal, especially when the authors' declared goal for comparing between different models was "to explore how our choice of individual-level log-linear modelling might have affected estimates".

And this is just one example of a political agenda overriding the most basic standards of scientific objectivity in this “study”.⏬

¹ A few days ago I wrote about the UN’s embarrassing attempt to revive the long-debunked “70% of fatalities in Gaza are women and children” lie.

But what is the ACTUAL percentage of women and children among the fatalities in Gaza? 🧵

https://twitter.com/MarkZlochin/status/1854981312366379519

² Recently I finished analyzing the names list published in September, in which women and children allegedly accounted for about 55% of all fatalities, and in the process, I encountered a major anomaly that raises some serious questions about the reliability of this data.⏬

¹ Today's strike at Al-Mawasi provides one of the clearest examples of how the number of casualties in Gaza is systematically (mis)reported in the media.

Let's start with facts:

- Several major news outlets, including @CNN , @bbc, @nytimes and @AJEnglish, initially reported that the number of casualties was 40, quoting "Civil Defense Authority" as the source of this number

- Interestingly enough, exactly the same claim about 40 fatalities was also made by "Government Media Office (GMO)" (aka, Hamas propaganda department)

- Few hours later, Gazan MoH reported that 19 bodies arrived to the hospitals, and the major discrepancy between the two numbers naturally led many people to conclude that GMO simply made the numbers up

- GMO rushed to issue an explanation, claiming that unlike MoH that only counted actual bodies that arrived to the hospital, their own figure also included people who were known to be present at that location at the time of the strike, but whose bodies were "vaporized" in the explosion.

Now, even if we assume for a second, for the sake of argument, that GMO's explanation is factually correct, and they do in fact have a full list of casualties almost immediately after the strike, there is one critical conclusion that necessarily follows from their claims.🧵 ² By their own admission, the numbers reported by the GMO - and quoted by the media as the "total number of fatalities" - already include missing people presumed dead.

This contradicts GMO's previous claims that there are 10,000 missing people, IN ADDITION to the total alleged number of casualties they report.

This also contradicts the claims that the death reports that has been previously marked as originating from "reliable media sources" - and later rebranded as "fatalities with incomplete information" - were based on actual bodies that arrived to hospitals' morgues. ⏬

Three key reasons why renewing the UNRWA funding will not "save lives":

1) Most of the aid was neither funded nor distributed by UNRWA

2) Over 80% of UNRWA's budget goes to salaries

3) The vast majority of UNRWA workers have nothing to do with aid

🧵

https://twitter.com/AnnelieseDodds/status/1814366576327393571

1a) Most of the aid was not funded by UNRWA

Prior to suspension of funding, about 14% of the aid was funded by UNRWA

After the suspension, miraculously, they started to bring more aid, but still over the first 7 months of the war, they were responsible for only about 20%. ⏬

¹ In the last couple of weeks you might have encountered this claim about "4,000 children buried under the rubble".

But where did this number, that all the virtue-signalling influencers are quoting, come from?

Well, let's take a trip down this Hamath rabbit hole, shall we? 🧵 ² The first ones to make this claim were @save_children in a press-release from June 24.


And how did THEY arrive at this number?

Glad you asked.⏬ savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-cen…

¹ The capacity of IPC "experts" to ignore their own data is really nothing short of amazing.

Here's one of the most mind-blowing examples:

The last IPC report contains 3 charts, showing the trends in Food Consumption Score (FCS) - a food security indicator used by the World Food Programme - and in all three graphs we see a dramatic improvement in food security over the last months.

First, let's take a look at the chart for Rafah Covernarate, where the vast majority of Gazan population was concentrated until the beginning of May.

As you can easily see, since December there has been a consistent improvement, with the percentage of respondents having a poor score dropping to just 3% in May.

For comparison, according to WFP, in 2022 about 14% of the households in Gaza had poor FCS scores.

In other words, the percentage of people with poor scores was almost five times lower in May than before the war. ⏬ ² Next, if we look at Deir Al-Balah and Khan Yunis Governarates, we see a similar downward trend with only 6% having poor FCS scores in May - less than half of the pre-war levels. ⏬

¹ Remember the famous IPC report claiming that Gaza - especially the northern part - is "facing imminent famine"?

Well, turns out that on June 4, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) published a new analysis that, as far as I could see, received ZERO coverage in the media - apparently, because its conclusions are not consistent with the apocalyptic narrative pushed by the "humanitarian organizations" in the last few months. 🧵
ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user… ² Let's start with the conclusions - FRC de facto confirms what I and several other researchers repeatedly stated back in March, when the IPC report was released - the evidence presented in the report was not consistent with the "Famine" classification (and some of the evidence clearly contradicted it).⏬

So, our "Emmy award-winning investigative journalist" @katie_polglase did it again and came out with another "investigation" that floods you with countless minor details, while managing to completely ignore the most critical ones.


So here are few key points from her own "investigation" that she tries to obscure: 🧵edition.cnn.com/2024/04/09/mid… 1) "Khader Al Za’anoun, a journalist in Gaza with the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, told CNN at the time that the majority of the casualties occurred as a result of people being rammed by aid trucks as they tried to escape Israeli gunfire."

So here we have a confirmation of the key Israeli claim that the majority of the casualties were not caused by the gunfire (we'll get in a second to the question whose gunfire exactly), but rather people were rammed by the trucks during the stampede that followed.

This is also a good time to remind that the claims about "80 percent of the injured struck by gunfire" were made by the heads of two hospitals - al-Shifa, which we now know was controlled (once again) by Hamas at the time of the incident, and Al-Awda, whose director announced just a day before that the hospital completely suspends all its medical services "due to severe shortage of fuel and medical supplies". ⏬

https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1764249986231939414

A thread about the key findings from the analysis of UNRWA fatalities data:

1) The percentage of men among UNRWA staff fatalities is disproportionately high - male workers account for 62 per cent of the deaths, despite representing only 41 per cent of the UNRWA staff in Gaza.

In other words, male UNRWA workers appear much more likely to be killed than female workers. For women, one in every 132 workers have been killed, while for men the chances of being killed are 2.3 times higher – one in every 57.

For comparison, according to the reports from Gazan Government Media Office, men are 10% less likely to be killed than women (more on this later).

And if we limit ourselves only to the deaths from official hospital records, the chances of men to be killed are about 1.4 times higher in comparison to women.

This difference between UNRWA statistics and the official reports for general population can have two possible (mutually non-exclusive) explanations:

- The official reports from Gaza grossly underreport adult male casualties, trying to mask the actual number of combatants killed

- The recent allegations about close entanglement between UNRWA and Hamas are correct and many UNRWA male workers were killed, because they were Hamas operatives. 🧵 2) There is a nearly perfect match between the number of female UNRWA fatalities and the total death count based on hospital records alone.

Some of you may recall a widely shared Correspondence letter that was published in “Lancet” back in December and claimed that there is no evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gazan MoH.

That claim was based on comparing the total number of deaths in Gaza with the number of killed UNRWA workers, but the paper - that was not peer-reviewed - has been criticized for basing its analysis on a questionable assumption that UNRWA workers constitute a representative sample of Gazan general population.

The disproportionately high percentage of men among UNRWA fatalities shows that this assumption was, indeed, incorrect.

However, mortality among female UNRWA staff does seems to provide a very useful proxy for the total mortality in Gaza, as reflected by the hospital records.⏬

¹ Few days ago, I wrote a thread showing that increasingly large percentage of reported deaths in Gaza is not coming from hospital records, but is either based on what Gazan MoH refers to as “reliable media sources” or on Google form reports.🧵

https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1757375368627925094?s=20

² In fact, according to the last MoH detailed report, hospital records account for under 60% of total claimed deaths since October 7, and for than less 30% of the claimed deaths in the last two months of the war.

⏬t.me/MOHMediaGaza/4…

¹ One of the most common responses I see whenever someone questions the accuracy of the death toll reported by "Gazan authorities" is:

"But Gaza MoH reports have been proven to be accurate in the past!”

This claim is misleading in two respects: 🧵 ² First, while the differences between the total death toll in Gazan reports and the post-war verification carried out by UN and IDF have been relatively small in the past wars, there has always been a huge difference in the estimates of the percentage of combatants. ⏬

¹ Yesterday, Al Jazeera shared a video with names of children that were allegedly killed in Gaza.

The list is based on the data from that aggregates and presents information from several official Palestinian sources.

So I decided to take a closer look at the information that they published. 🧵

shireen.ps

https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1753401017469633010?s=20

² Let’s start with the most obvious - the number of children here is 7,998 – not 11,500 that was recently reported by the same Al-Jazeera, or 13,000 claimed by many other pro-Palestinian propagandists. ⏬