By ADAM ELIYAHU BERKOWITZ AUGUST 25, 2026

For nearly two years, the world was told a simple story: Israel was starving Gaza. The United Nations declared famine. The Secretary-General called it a “living hell.” A UN commission accused Israel of genocide. Photographs of emaciated children circulated across every major news outlet, and Israel’s denials were treated as the predictable defense of a guilty party. Now the UN’s own data has quietly dismantled the story it built.

A population-based nutrition survey conducted by the State of Palestine Nutrition Cluster, led by UNICEF and using the gold-standard weight-for-height measurement researchers had “repeatedly failed” to collect for most of the war, found that only 0.5 percent of children under five in Gaza showed signs of acute malnutrition. UNICEF’s own release put the figure near one percent. Either number places Gaza among the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the entire region, far below neighboring Egypt and Jordan. “Wasting is low across all domains,” the survey concluded, “suggesting no widespread acute malnutrition at population level.” Gaza’s children were also found to have a stunting rate of 12.2 percent, less than half the regional average of 26 percent. Elena Naumova, a Tufts University professor of nutrition epidemiology, said of the number: “I thought it would be much higher, to be honest.” A researcher with experience surveying famine conditions in the Horn of Africa said she had “never seen” obesity emerge in a population declared famine-stricken a year earlier. “We have people in Africa eating wild grasses just to stay alive,” she said. “There’s no obesity problem.”