No one’s having more trouble accepting the possibility of peace than the United Nations.
While Gazans are finishing school, opening cafes, and posting photos of their full chicken dinners, one UN agency is still banging the drum of “acute malnutrition”—this as the crossings are open and the aid is flowing. UN relief coordinator Tom Fletcher, the source of the “14,000 dead babies in 48 hours” lie—one of the more dangerous and consequential hoaxes of the war—is meeting with the Irish government, which has itself achieved a previously unimagined level of irrelevance. And the International Court of Justice, the UN’s pretend world court, is issuing new demands of Israel to give Hamas-adjacent UN activists more access in Gaza.
All of it is meaningless, of course, having long been overtaken by events. Palestinian social media is currently the UN’s worst nightmare: Gazans with big smiles and full bellies. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously said, war is over if you want it. It’s just that the UN doesn’t want it.
Thankfully, nobody cares what the UN wants. But it’s worth examining why the UN is so angry that the war has ceased and Palestinian lives are improving.
One reason is that the war’s end makes it possible to start compiling definitive statistics. And those statistics make it crystal clear that UN-affiliated agencies and their partner NGOs have conducted large-scale fraud, the blast radius of which has incinerated the credibility of much of Western academic and “humanitarian” institutions.
Let’s start with food. Salo Aizenberg—who probably deserves some sort of medal for his painstaking work compiling the true statistical toll of the war—pointed out this week that the UN-backed IPC declared a Gaza famine in August, and that we can now check the numbers against the prediction and verify exactly what the IPC got wrong.
Between the famine declaration and the cease-fire, there should have been 10,143 famine deaths in Gaza. Using Hamas’s own numbers of such deaths—which are obviously not undercounted—the total famine deaths in that period was 192.
That means the IPC predicted about 10,000 famine deaths and was short by about 10,000. The IPC is now at Candace Owens’s level of credibility and statistical reliability.
There was no famine. That’s not an opinion, it’s an indisputable fact. Also indisputable is that there was no near-famine. It wasn’t a close call.
That, by the way, is good news. Although the anti-Israel activist world was hoping for mass starvation, those of us who aren’t monsters are very happy that there was no famine in Gaza. Pay attention to those who dispute this and those who show their disappointment.
Then there is the main event: the accusation of “genocide.” While this has been debunked again and again and again throughout the war—to the extent that anyone accusing Israel of genocide has disqualified themselves from legitimate debate over matters of war and peace—now that there is a cease-fire, we can work with steady numbers.
Aizenberg noted in September that using Hamas’s own statistics, and subtracting natural deaths and fatalities caused by munitions fired by Gazan combatants, one gets a total of about 33,000 civilian casualties. The widely accepted number of combatant casualties is at about 25,000.
Every one of those 33,000 civilian casualties is a tragedy and a testament to the effectiveness and ruthlessness of Hamas’s human-shield strategy. That number also means that there are fewer than 1.5 civilian deaths for each combatant war death, an almost unheard-of level of care for civilians by the Israeli army.
Again, these are the numbers. A genocide didn’t happen—that we knew a long time ago. But it is now clear that there is no plausible case that Israel used excessive force against civilians or targeted noncombatants. The opposite is true: In pursuing Hamas, Israeli soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians. This is not an interpretation of some contextless video floating around social media; this is established fact.
The United Nations and other “humanitarian” and “human rights” groups needed this war to go on in perpetuity so they could forestall a public reckoning they richly deserve. Peace is bad for their business.
Finally, the “genocide” and “deliberate starvation” accusations can now take their place alongside history’s other assorted grotesque expressions of anti-Judaism. Just as Jews should feel no obligation to refute the accusation that they are “the sons of apes and pigs,” they should similarly avoid the debasement of being forced to answer for the fabricated claims of “genocide,” the intention of which is merely to incite violence against Jews and to diminish the crimes of the Holocaust.
