U.N.-Backed Famine Watchdog Quietly Changed Standards, Easing Way To Declare Famine in Gaza

"The U.N.-affiliated watchdog group that recently declared a ‘worst-case scenario of famine’ in Gaza quietly changed one of its key reporting metrics while doing so, making it easier to formally declare that there is a famine in the Hamas-controlled territory.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—a network of Western governments, the United Nations, and nonprofit groups—determined in a July 29 report ’the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,’ claiming that ‘mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths.’

Media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and ABC News relied on the IPC report to claim that Israeli policies have led to mass starvation, with the Times stating that ‘months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory’ have caused a famine ‘across most of Gaza.’

Unlike previous IPC reports on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the July report includes a metric—known as mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC)—the agency has not historically used to determine whether a famine is taking place. The report also includes a lowered threshold for the proportion of children who must be considered malnourished for the IPC to declare a famine, down to 15 percent from 30 percent.

Aid workers traditionally conduct detailed weight and height measurements to determine whether a child is suffering from acute malnutrition. MUAC, by contrast, consists only of a child's arm circumference, a measurement that can be done more quickly and is considered less precise. In the past, the IPC has declared famine after finding that 30 percent of children in an area are suffering from acute malnutrition using their weight and height measurements. In the recent Gaza report, the IPC said it would declare famine if it found that 15 percent of children were suffering from acute malnutrition using their arm circumference measurement and if the agency found unspecified ‘evidence of rapidly worsening underlying drivers.’

The ‘pretty big shift’ in standards, one veteran aid industry insider told the Washington Free Beacon, suggests the IPC is ‘lowering the bar, or trying to make it easier for the famine determination to be made.’...

most recent Gaza report caught some veteran aid workers by surprise.

‘If this is what you are considering, it is an issue,’ one veteran aid practitioner told the Free Beacon. ‘If you're planning to make a famine declaration based off the 15-percent MUAC, we as practitioners would say that's an issue.’

The aid worker pointed to previous famine declarations the IPC issued in Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan, all of which used different metrics...

Richard Goldberg, a former White House and National Security Council staffer in both Trump administrations who spent a decade performing humanitarian aid oversight on Capitol Hill, told the Free Beacon the IPC standards are another example of U.N. malfeasance.

‘If you keep pulling the thread here, you start to understand this is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the world,’ said Goldberg, who now serves as a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. ‘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.’"