No, the 'UN' didn't lower its standards for declaring a famine in Gaza

On July 29, the world’s leading food-crisis authority issued a stark alert: “Worst-case scenario of Famine unfolding in the Gaza Strip.” The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, explained that “conflict and displacement” had “intensified,” while “access to food and other essential items and services” had “plummeted to unprecedented levels.” As a result, starvation, malnutrition, and disease were driving an increase in hunger-related deaths. If immediate action were not taken, the IPC warned, including an end to the war and a dramatic ramping up of humanitarian aid, the result would be “catastrophic human suffering.”

This language was measured, wonky, and — as typifies a fact-finding organization that informs but tries to stay out of high-level politics — aggressively neutral: the words “Israel,” “Palestinian,” or “Hamas” do not appear in the text of the three-page report. A note that “the safe space for the population of the Gaza Strip is shrinking to less than 12 percent of the territory” includes no mention of who is shrinking that space, or why.

Yet one party felt deeply implicated. Israel and its defenders, already racing to tamp down and discredit reports of Gazans’ starvation as a result of its ongoing siege and blockade, went into overdrive, desperate to find any flaw that could be used to dismiss the alert. On August 12, it seemed they got one. The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative online magazine edited by Eliana Yael Johnson¹ , published a bombshell report: the IPC, it said, had “quietly changed” its rules “to make it possible to declare a famine in the Strip.” Specifically, the Free Beacon claimed:

The article, titled “UN-Backed Famine Watchdog Quietly Changed Standards, Easing Way To Declare Famine in Gaza” was quickly picked up by the pro-Israel media advocacy group HonestReporting, which summarized it under the headline “Famine Standard Was Lowered for Gaza, Media Turned a Blind Eye.” From there, it proliferated widely, across X and TikTok, through the wire-service-style Jewish News Syndicate (“UN Watchdog Lowered Bar to Declare Gaza Famine”) and throughout pro-war and reactionary Israeli media.

The story, however, was false. The IPC² has been using mid-upper arm circumference as a way of determining the severity of food crises for many years. It formally accepted it as a metric for famine classification in 2019. You can see this in the IPC’s technical manual, last updated in 2021, over two years before the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s current siege of Gaza began:

…

As noted in the chart, Global Acute Malnutrition can be calculated in three ways: “weight-for-height Z-score,” or WHZ — defined as “the percentage of children under five who are below -2 standard deviations of the median of weight for height”; body mass index scores, or BMI; or, as in this case, MUAC — the circumference of the upper arms of children under five. And these different ways of measuring have different cutoffs for Phase 5 Catastrophe/Famine. For BMI, it’s at least 40% of cases. For WHZ, 30%. And for MUAC, as indicated, 15%.

Here’s how the IPC summarized those standards in their July 29 alert:

In other words, Free Beacon reporter Adam Kredo — whose LinkedIn profile says he’s a former intern at the Jerusalem Post and a former writer for Washington Jewish Week, which picked up the JNS story — saw a reference to a measurement he was unfamiliar with in the IPC alert, saw two different numbers, and let his imagination do the rest.

The Free Beacon knows it messed up. Sometime after the initial publication, an editor updated (you might say quietly updated) the key paragraph of Kredo’s story, with the following changes in bold:

But the updated version was also misleading. All the IPC does is say whether famine or other food crises are likely happening. As explained in the IPC’s on guidance: “The IPC does not ‘declare Famine’ or issue ‘Famine declarations,’ but rather facilitates the analysis that allows governments, international/regional organizations and humanitarian agencies to issue more prominent statements or declarations.” They have not even issued an updated analysis on the situation in Gaza yet; such an analysis will almost certainly include a review by the Famine Review Committee, a separate ad hoc body of experts that goes over their findings. (An IPC spokesperson told me that determination, one way or another, is likely in the coming weeks.)

So when the IPC uses the 15% benchmark for upper-arm circumference as a way of determining whether famine conditions exist, that is about as close as they get to “declaring famine.” And, indeed, they have used that metric before: in South Sudan in 2020, and in Sudan last year. In other words, the sentence — “the 15 percent threshold had previously been used to indicate a famine was likely” — is nothing more than misleading way of saying the Free Beacon’s entire story was wrong.

And it gets worse! The still-incorrect correction was first made as a stealth edit. In the most recent version, the correction is still not marked as such, but alluded to with a vague editor’s note at the bottom, reading: “This piece has been updated to include additional and clarifying information on the IPC's famine classification process.” Likely because of the backhanded way this “update” was shared, none of the other outlets or organizations that picked up the story have corrected their stories or posts.

This is, frankly, hilarious, given the meltdown that surrounded the New York Times’ addition of an editor’s note to its big July 24 story on starvation in Gaza, noting that a skeletal child featured in a photo had “pre-existing health problems.” Pro-Palestine and human-rights critics rightly pointed out that those “problems” (cerebral palsy, according to other sources) do not cause a child to waste away into a skeleton absent larger structural changes — namely, a persistent lack of food. Pro-Israel critics, meanwhile, tried to inflate the editor’s note into a fiction that the Times’s starvation story had been “rolled back” or “retracted.”

If appending an editor’s note that doesn’t change any of the fundamentals of the story is a “retraction,” then what would you call sneaking in a misleading correction that undermines a story’s entire thesis? Perhaps the Free Beacon can investigate.

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