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January 27, 2025

The Israeli hostage releases remind us that the ‘Gaza famine’ was fake

By Andrea Widburg

Now that a few of the Israeli hostages are home, we’re beginning to hear details about their lives in captivity. One specific detail really caught my eye, which is that the women experienced kwashiorkor, a sign of severe malnutrition that sees its victims retain fluids to the point at which their stomachs look explosively large. Aside from showing how terribly the hostages suffered, it’s a reminder that the claim that there was a famine in Gaza was a hoax because, unbelievably, none of the published images showed people suffering from kwashiorkor.

Throughout the war in Gaza, Israel flooded the region with food—or at least it tried to, although UN inefficiency and Hamas theft did slow the food getting to Gaza residents. As an aside, this is the only time in the history of the world that, during a hot war, one side kept the other side supplied with life’s necessities. At this point, it’s hard to tell if Israel is the world’s most moral country or its most stupid.

Image: Israeli hostages parading before Hamas. X screen grab.

Despite Israel’s efforts, the propagandists made sure to tell the world that Gaza was starving because Israel had dared attack Hamas, a military organization deliberately embedded throughout civilian populations as the ultimate defense.

We had videos showing plump, allegedly starving babies, only for it to be obvious that the videos are AI hoaxes--which you can tell by watching their hands and feet:

An X site, GAZAWOOD – the PALLYWOOD saga, exposed many less obvious lies, such as children who are actually suffering from the disabilities of inbreeding or footage that was taken in other parts of the world, such as Syria, Afghanistan, or Africa. Here are just a handful of tweets showing how GAZAWOOD exposed the famine hoaxes:

Notably, the propaganda focuses solely on children. Many have noticed that Gaza’s residents were not showing any of the physical signs of famine. Indeed, they looked...fat:

The fat adults versus the allegedly starving children means that all the children’s images are fake or the adults were eating all the food (or maybe eating the children!).

I’m not saying that war is a picnic or that the people in Gaza were living the high life. I am saying, though, that with Israel, the UN, and other countries sending food, famine wasn’t the problem.

Well, that’s not quite correct. It was a problem among one group of people—the hostages. That was already obvious with previously recovered hostages, such as Farhan Al-Qadi, who even CNN conceded was malnourished.

With the latest round of hostage recoveries, we’re getting an insight into just how malnourished they were, among other forms of abuse:

New details about the captivity of the female IDF soldiers, especially, Daniella Gilboa, were revealed on Sunday by Etty Schwartz, Daniella’s great aunt.

Speaking with Kan News, she said “She (Daniella’s mother) can’t say much and I can’t say much either. She also didn’t tell me a lot. She said that at times they only ate one or two pitas a day, until their stomachs swelled.”

“Sometimes there was food and they would cook and prepare food,” she added.

According to other reports, some of the female soldiers were forced to cook food for their captors but forbidden from tasting any of it. At least one female soldier was held alone in a dark tunnel for an extended period of time with almost no food.

The telling detail in that report is this sentence: “She said that at times they only ate one or two pitas a day, until their stomachs swelled.”

What the aunt is describing is kwashiorkor, which occurs when people have severe protein deficits, causing them to have extreme edema and liver enlargement. It can be paired with, or precede, marasmus, which is the general appearance of starvation, as everything wastes away. We’ve all seen pictures of both. Certainly, the myriad famines in Africa have yielded such heartbreaking photos:

Public domain.

So, yes, there was a famine in Gaza, but it wasn’t among the Gazans, for despite searching, I haven't found a single photo showing this most telling sign of famine. Instead, the famine was among the hostages whose medical needs went unaddressed, who were kept in inhumane circumstances, and who were systematically starved. I’m now waiting for the UN to speak up.

Waiting... Waiting... Waitin... Waiti... Wait... Wai... Wa... W...

Aww! Never mind!

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