UN-Affiliated Hunger Group Quietly Changed Standards So Israel Could Be Accused Of Gaza Famine

In a move that made it easier for media around the world to vilify Israel for causing a “famine” in Gaza, a U.N.-affiliated watchdog group secretly changed its metrics to make the requirements for declaring a “famine” much easier.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which was originally developed in 2004 by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Security Analysis Unit and serves as the world’s most widely recognized hunger assessment, normally requires a threshold of 30% of children in an area suffering from acute malnutrition to declare a famine, and uses detailed weight and height measurements to decide whether a child is suffering from acute malnutrition.

But in their July 29 report, the metrics were changed so that 30% became 15% and the measurement for determining malnutrition was mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), a far less reliable guide to malnutrition.

“A chart included in the notice shows less than 8 percent of children in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis suffer from acute malnutrition ‘based on MUAC,’” The Washington Free Beacon reported. “That figure is 16.5 percent in Gaza City, just above the new 15-percent threshold but well below the 30-percent level the IPC traditionally uses.”

“In all of the famines that have been declared, they’ve been using the 30-percent global malnutrition measurement, most of which have been based on the weight-for-height metric—which, again, is much harder to collect, much more burdensome, and it’s 30 percent,” an experienced aid worker told the Free Beacon. “So, this asterisk that’s been added for Gaza essentially says that they’re going to allow a 15-percent global malnutrition rate measured by MUAC. … I think many people would say it’s like lowering the bar or making it more possible, essentially, to declare whatever it is that they’re going to declare.”

“If you keep pulling the thread here, you start to understand this is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the world,” former National Security Council staffer Richard Goldberg, who checked humanitarian aid on Capitol Hill for a decade, said. “There is no famine in Gaza—the data thresholds don’t support that claim—and yet we have the United Nations changing the rules to fit the desired political outcome.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee stated, “This is a highly technical report but reveals how UN-Backed Famine Watchdog Quietly Changed Standards, Easing Way To Declare Famine in Gaza to aid Hamas and blame @Israel  and @IsraeliPM.”