Shoméa - שוֹמֵע

Max 📟 Verified account @MaxNordau · Sep 6

In April 2024, Harvard gave "the world's leading famine expert" a webinar to declare that Gaza was now the most intense famine since records began, already worse than a famine that killed a quarter of a million people, and about to get much, much worse.

Alex de Waal wrote the standard textbook on famine, runs the World Peace Foundation, and helped write starvation crimes into international law. In January 2024, he told Owen Jones that famine would probably arrive by early February. February came and went. In March, he told CBS that famine was expected between then and May. On April 30, 2024, with May a day away and still no famine, he doubled down AGAIN.

0:00 Explains the IPC Phase 5 famine threshold: excess deaths of 2 per 10,000 per day, "deep, deep, deep into a crisis"
0:28 "Gaza is a famine... the most intense famine that we have seen since records began"
0:48 The IPC estimate: 96 percent of Gaza's population, 2.2 million people, in Phase 3, the great majority in Phases 4 or 5
1:28 "We're already worse in absolute numbers than Somalia," a famine that killed 250,000 people, "the worst famine up to now recorded for this century." And the figures are "going to get much, much worse"
2:17 "That responsibility falls on the government of Israel"
2:39 The harm will be "lifelong and actually intergenerational"
2:56 "I call this famine. If this is not famine, then the word really has no meaning"

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What actually happened:

The famine never arrived. Five weeks after this webinar, the IPC's own Famine Review Committee reviewed the famine claims: "not plausible," and "the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring."
reliefweb.int/report/occupie…

He explained the threshold himself: 2 excess deaths per 10,000 per day, which for Gaza would be over 400 hunger deaths a day. Gaza's recorded malnutrition death rate in 2025 (74 deaths through late July, per the WHO) works out to roughly the same per-capita rate as the United States, where the CDC counted over 20,000 malnutrition deaths in 2022.
emro.who.int/media/news/mal…

After the October 2025 ceasefire, a UNICEF-led survey found 0.5 percent acute child malnutrition in Gaza, one of the lowest rates in the region.
thefp.com/p/unicef-data-…

Full webinar, April 30, 2024: youtu.be/PAq2KLWrKK4

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Alex de Waal said that if Gaza is not famine, then the word really has no meaning.

Five weeks later, his own review committee could not find his famine.

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