Kamala Harris Misleads on Gaza Food Shortage

K amala Harris met with Benjamin Netanyahu last Thursday, then went right out to tell journalists that Israel wasn’t doing enough to prevent suffering in Gaza. Harris spoke about shortages of food across the coastal strip, including “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity” affecting half a million people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s population.

If Harris had paid closer attention to Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, she might have understood that Israel has facilitated a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which prevented a famine that the world’s leading experts on food security declared to be “imminent.”

The U.S. media has done a first-rate job of ignoring this unexpected success, but the data — not just the Israeli data, but data from both the U.N. and the same experts who declared a famine in Gaza to be imminent — support Netanyahu’s version of events.

Netanyahu reminded his audience at the Capitol that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court wants to charge him with a long list of war crimes, including the deliberate starvation of Gaza. Yet Israel has enabled more than 40,000 trucks filled with food and other essential goods to enter the Gaza Strip.

On a website the Israeli government unveiled earlier this month, anyone with an internet connection can see the entries for 42,181 truckloads of food, medicine, and other goods that have passed through checkpoints at the Gaza border. The website lists the date of each shipment, its source, and its weight in tons.

Per Netanyahu, half a million tons of food have made it into Gaza. According to the Israeli website, the exact figure is 580,624 tons since the beginning of the year.

Meanwhile, the U.N. has counted 25,724 truckloads of material entering Gaza, or 40 percent fewer truckloads than the Israelis count. The U.N. also makes its data available on the web and began doing so months earlier than the Israelis, spurring them to do the same. U.N. and Israeli data actually tracked each other closely until the beginning of May, when substantial numbers of private-sector shipments began arriving in Gaza.

The U.N.’s role is to distribute aid, so it has little or no insight into shipments of other kinds. But the U.N. is counting on the revival of Gaza’s marketplaces — it distributes cash to hundreds of thousands of families there to purchase essential goods.

While counting trucks is not too difficult, a much harder challenge is to determine how much aid is enough to feed Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants. Netanyahu asserted there’s enough food coming in to provide 3,000 calories per day for every man, woman, and child in Gaza — substantially more than the minimum needed to survive.

The source of that figure is a study conducted by a team of Israeli scholars, several of whom are affiliated with the country’s Ministry of Health. Using data that the government collected about the contents of each shipment entering Gaza, the team calculated an average supply of 3,374 calories per day per Gazan entering the Strip during the first four months of this year.

The main shortcoming of this study, as its authors acknowledge, is that they have no information about whether there was an equitable distribution of the food after it arrived. News reports have documented extensive looting of aid deliveries, and Israeli officials have charged that Hamas claims much of the aid for itself.

Still, the same experts who said a famine was once imminent have confirmed a sharp increase in the availability of food over the past four months. Those experts are part of a process known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which brings together U.N. agencies, humanitarian organizations, and government officials to assess the severity of food shortages, which they rank on a scale of one to five, with five being “catastrophic.”

In mid March, the IPC said that 30 percent of Gaza’s population was already in Phase 5 and that the number would rise to 50 percent by mid July. In late June, a new IPC assessment painted a much different picture: The percentage of Gaza residents facing catastrophic conditions had fallen to 15 percent, although the IPC projected it could rise somewhat by late summer, to a point where 495,000 people, or 22 percent of Gaza residents, would still be facing “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.”

It’s no accident that Vice President Harris used those exact words to describe the situation in Gaza. Technically speaking, what she said was 100 percent factual. Yet her selective presentation of the facts left an impression of Israeli responsibility for food shortages in Gaza, when the real story is the exact opposite: Israel facilitated a surge of aid sufficient to prevent a famine. A better ally would have told the whole truth.