A lead organization monitoring for food crises around the world withdrew a new report this week warning of imminent famine in north Gaza under what it called Israel's “near-total blockade,” after the US asked for its retraction, US officials told the Associated Press. The move follows public criticism of the report from the US ambassador to Israel.
The rare public dispute drew accusations from prominent aid and human-rights figures that the work of the US-funded Famine Early Warning System Network, meant to reflect the data-driven analysis of unbiased international experts, has been tainted by politics. A declaration of famine would be a great embarrassment for Israel, which has insisted that its 15-month war in Gaza is aimed against the Hamas militant group and not against its civilian population.
US ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew earlier this week called the warning by the internationally recognized group inaccurate and “irresponsible." Lew and the US Agency for International Development, which funds the monitoring group, both said the findings failed to properly account for rapidly changing circumstances in north Gaza.
Humanitarian and human rights officials expressed fear of US political interference in the world's monitoring system for famines. The US Embassy in Israel and the State Department declined comment. FEWS officials did not respond to questions.
“We work day and night with the UN and our Israeli partners to meet humanitarian needs — which are great — and relying on inaccurate data is irresponsible,” Lew said Tuesday.
USAID confirmed to the AP that it had asked the famine-monitoring organization to withdraw its stepped-up warning issued in a report dated Monday. The report did not appear among the top updates on the group's website Thursday, but the link to it remained active.
The dispute points in part to the difficulty of assessing the extent of starvation in largely isolated northern Gaza. Thousands in recent weeks have fled an intensified Israeli military crackdown that aid groups say has allowed delivery of only a dozen trucks of food and water since roughly October.
FEWS Net said in its withdrawn report that unless Israel changes its policy, it expects the number of people dying of starvation and related ailments in north Gaza to reach between two and 15 per day sometime between January and March.
The internationally recognized mortality threshold for famine is two or more deaths a day per 10,000 people.
FEWS was created by the US development agency in the 1980s and is still funded by it. But it is intended to provide independent, neutral and data-driven assessments of hunger crises, including in war zones. Its findings help guide decisions on aid by the US and other governments and agencies around the world.
A spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, Oren Marmorstein, welcomed the US ambassador's public challenge of the famine warning. “FEWS NET - Stop spreading these lies!” Marmorstein said on X.
In challenging the findings publicly, the US ambassador "leveraged his political power to undermine the work of this expert agency,” said Scott Paul, a senior manager at the Oxfam America humanitarian nonprofit. Paul stressed that he was not weighing in on the accuracy of the data or methodology of the report.
“The whole point of creating FEWS is to have a group of experts make assessments about imminent famine that are untainted by political considerations,” said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor in international affairs at Princeton University. “It sure looks like USAID is allowing political considerations -- the Biden administration’s worry about funding Israel’s starvation strategy -- to interfere."
Israel says it has been operating in recent months against Hamas militants still active in northern Gaza. It says the vast majority of the area’s residents have fled and relocated to Gaza City, where most aid destined for the north is delivered. But some critics, including a former defense minister, have accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza’s far north, near the Israeli border.
North Gaza has been one of the areas hardest-hit by fighting and Israel’s restrictions on aid throughout its war with Hamas militants. Global famine monitors and UN and US officials have warned repeatedly of the imminent risk of malnutrition and deaths from starvation hitting famine levels.
International officials say Israel last summer increased the amount of aid it was admitting there, under US pressure. The US and UN have said Gaza’s people as a whole need between 350 and 500 trucks a day of food and other vital needs.
But the UN and aid groups say Israel recently has again blocked almost all aid to that part of Gaza. Cindy McCain, the American head of the UN World Food Program, called earlier this month for political pressure to get food flowing to Palestinians there.
Israel says it places no restrictions on aid entering Gaza and that hundreds of truckloads of goods are piled up at Gaza’s crossings and accused international aid agencies of failing to deliver the supplies. The UN and other aid groups say Israeli restrictions, ongoing combat, looting and insufficient security by Israeli troops make it impossible to deliver aid effectively.
Lew, the US ambassador, said the famine warning was based on “outdated and inaccurate” data. He pointed to uncertainty over how many of the 65,000-75,000 people remaining in northern Gaza had fled in recent weeks, saying that skewed the findings.
FEWS said in its report that its famine assessment holds even if as few as 10,000 people remain.
USAID in its statement to AP said it had reviewed the report before it became public, and noted “discrepancies” in population estimates and some other data. The US agency had asked the famine warning group to address those uncertainties and be clear in its final report to reflect how those uncertainties affected its predictions of famine, it said.
“This was relayed before Ambassador Lew’s statement,” USAID said in a statement. “FEWS NET did not resolve any of these concerns and published in spite of these technical comments and a request for substantive engagement before publication. As such, USAID asked to retract the report.”
Roth criticized the US challenge of the report in light of the gravity of the crisis there.
“This quibbling over the number of people desperate for food seems a politicized diversion from the fact that the Israeli government is blocking virtually all food from getting in,” he said, adding that “the Biden administration seems to be closing its eyes to that reality, but putting its head in the sand won’t feed anyone.”
The US, Israel’s main backer, provided a record amount of military support in the first year of the war. At the same time, the Biden administration repeatedly urged Israel to allow more access to aid deliveries in Gaza overall, and warned that failing to do so could trigger US restrictions on military support. The administration recently said Israel was making improvements and declined to carry out its threat of restrictions.
Military support for Israel’s war in Gaza is politically charged in the US, with Republicans and some Democrats staunchly opposed any effort to limit US support over the suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The Biden administration’s reluctance to do more to press Israel for improved treatment of civilians undercut support for Democrats in last month’s elections.
