Israel threatens to target U.N. hunger monitor’s funding over ‘fabricated’ famine report

"The Foreign Ministry will send a letter to the United Nations today demanding it retract the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system’s ‘fabricated report’ declaring famine in Gaza, Foreign Ministry Director General Eden Bar Tal announces at an English-language press conference.

The letter, addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warns the UN that if it does not walk back the report, Israel will launch a campaign encouraging IPC donor countries to halt funding by presenting evidence appearing to disprove its findings and highlighting the hunger monitor’s alleged unreliability.

At the press conference, Bar Tal accuses the IPC of deliberately ignoring its own evidence standards to reach a ‘prefabricated conclusion of famine’ in support of ‘Hamas fake starvation propaganda,’ backing up the ministry’s earlier denunciations of the report after its publication on Friday.

He presents evidence gathered by Israel claiming that the IPC manipulated data through cherry-picking and misrepresentation, relied on speculative rather than evidence-based mortality assumptions, and ignored or downplayed available signs of improvement.

Among the evidence Bar Tal brings are findings showing that the IPC based its conclusions on only half of its July data — 7,519 children averaging 16 percent acute malnutrition, just above the 15% famine threshold — instead of the full July dataset of 15,749 children, which showed acute malnutrition rates of 12–13.5%. He also says the IPC improperly relied on clinical samples rather than healthy population samples, in violation of its own guidelines.

In the letter, Bar Tal demands that the IPC ‘conduct an urgent and transparent review’ of the findings against the report that ‘will address methodological breaches and avoid misleading the international community, the public and policymakers.’..."