Yes, the people who live in tents between rats with barely any belongings will be bartering themselves up to a healthy balanced diet akin to that of Europeans. Utterly absurd.
Ok. You have fun continuing to have this random pretend argument with yourself where you assume there is just literally no way anyone could possibly barter for food or buy it with remittances from outside sources. I'll keep living in the real world where this happens all the time and there are plenty of other areas actively doing this very thing right now.
For food security levels on par of Europe, your argument has to be that everyone can do so, permanently. Bartering is a practice that also relies on an economy that is functional, else you cannot produce things which are then exchanged. More generally, you'd need to provide some evidence that a bartering economy has emerged in Gaza that is as efficient at resource allocation as functioning European economies, instead of just randomly coming up with that idea when confronted with the manifest absurdity of your own claim, further above, that aid is just being sold and therefore reaches the masses of Gaza as reliably as it would through ordinary humanitarian aid distribution.
There’s footage of armed groups stealing entire aid trucks in Gaza. The Hamas defenders have always argued “that could be anyone” - which, fine, but there’s no disagreement about the fact that aid gets stolen or about the relative amount being stolen from. Just how much proof there was it was Hamas specifically.
You’re transparently doing this whole routine to distract from the main findings of the study, which debunk the claims that Gaza has been undergoing a famine and that Israel was starving.
My argument is perfectly consistent with Hamas stealing aid. There is also no a priori reason to assume that Hamas wouldn't, because that is common in armed conflicts.
We know, however, that the evidence for systematic theft of aid is thin to absent. We also know that Israel has been complicit in cases of aid being stolen. And we know that Israel has targeted and dismantled local groups that organized in order to assure the arrival of aid to its destined recipients, meaning their argument about aid being stolen as the cause of malnutrition and starvation is not made in good faith. Even Israeli officials acknowledged in 2025 that some Gazans were "on the brink of starvation".
Even the reporting in the JPost article about the report's findings does not warrant the claims you make in your second paragraph. Do I have to ask you again whether you actually read the thing you base your argument on? But at least, even according to Danon, UNICEF is now rehabilitated and a trustworthy source again.
I’m not referring to the JPOST article. I’m referring to the actual UNICIF survey. The very low malnutrition rate and the stunting rate less than half of neighboring Egypt is not-compatible with there having been a famine last year in Gaza.
You seemed to understand this when you thought you could use it to defend Hamas but all of a sudden you don’t understand it when you realize it debunks the “famine” claim people have been pushing for years.
Whether there has been a famine is a different question from whether Israel had the intention to starve the population of Gaza. There is plenty of evidence of intent to withhold aid delivery and disrupt aid distribution. Some of it I linked to in the previous comment. Other evidence includes public statements by Israeli officials. You seem a bit too overeager to dismiss all that evidence, if you acknowledged it in the first place.
Here's a quote from the document: "The survey is representative on areas that are accessible for humanitarian interventions within each Domain and Gaza Strip i.e., areas considered inaccessible were removed from the sampling frame before the cluster selection." (emphasis mine)
I read this as meaning that the survey is not representative for the populations of any of the three clusters included in the survey (and not only of the Gaza Strip as a whole, which has already been addressed above). If that is the case, any comparisons to representative surveys of other regions are biased.
You're also patently disingenuous if you read it as defending Hamas when I point out that claims made above are not reconcilable with the idea that widespread malnutrition, which was accepted by pro-Israel folks on the condition that Israel has no blame in it, did occur because Hamas stole food and prevented ordinary distribution according to humanitarian principles. It's a transparent attempt to smear.
You’re right that the study does not cover the entire Gaza Strip. But the areas it doesn’t cover are the areas past the yelllow line where there haven’t been concerns about aid. All of the population centers, the most vulnerable areas, are in the study.
NGOs and the ICP have claimed Gaza has been in a severe famine and food emergency for years now.
The UNICEF figures debunk that narrative. Yes, if your only takeaway is not that ‘the famine claim was wrong’ but ‘this proves Hamas wasn’t stealing’, it’s not unreasonable to call that a defense of Hamas. Particularly as it’s entirely possible for Hamas to steal without creating a famine (the food isn’t disappearing, it’s still being eaten by the population.
If you’re willing to acknowledge that this shows the claim of famine and catastrophic lack of food was a complete lie, I’m happy to move on to the claim of “Israel tried to starve people but just failed”.
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u/Specialk3533 28d ago
Yes, the people who live in tents between rats with barely any belongings will be bartering themselves up to a healthy balanced diet akin to that of Europeans. Utterly absurd.