The United Nations’ famine monitoring organization issued its latest report on the humanitarian situation in Gaza on Friday, and once again made dire assertions about severe food insecurity in the territory.

It also stood by a determination it made in August that a full-blown famine had broken out in Gaza, despite hard data demonstrating that malnutrition levels never reached the famine threshold, and again failed to provide mortality data anywhere in the vicinity of famine levels.

Several analysts have argued that the new study repeats previous flaws and has failed to use appropriate data, and that this erroneous factual basis has again led the IPC to conclusions about the food security situation in Gaza that are not reflective of reality.

The IPC, or the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification organization, is a department of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and is considered an authoritative monitor of malnutrition and famine around the world.

Its reports on Gaza have been cited by the International Court of Justice in the genocide suit filed by South Africa against Israel, and by the UN and human rights organizations as supposed evidence of Israeli genocide against Gazans during the war.

It has on several occasions predicted famine that never transpired, and even acknowledged one of those errors in June 2024.

In response to a request for comment by The Times of Israel, the IPC insisted that its analysts used the available data appropriately and in accordance with IPC guidelines.

The organization maintained its famine determinations were based on segmented data which it said showed famine levels had been breached, and claimed that non-trauma mortality data from Gaza used to evaluate famine was underestimated and that “trends” not “absolute numbers” also justified its famine determination.

The IPC uses three key factors for determining famine: household food consumption, evaluated through phone surveys; malnutrition, determined by physical measurements in malnutrition screenings; and mortality, using the crude death rate metric of two out of every 10,000 people dying from all causes other than traumatic injury.

In its latest report, covering October 16 to November 30, the IPC said that food security conditions in the Gaza Strip “remain critical” and classified the entire territory as being in the “Emergency” Phase 4 category — the second-highest of its five levels of food insecurity.

The report once again cited malnutrition data from the Global Nutrition Cluster organization, which collects data from physical malnutrition screening studies performed on the ground in Gaza.

But the IPC report cited only the unweighted results of these studies, which are unreliable and cannot be used to obtain a true picture of the malnutrition situation, instead of using the readily available weighted results from Nutrition Cluster.

The IPC report also failed to provide the aggregated data of the multiple studies Nutrition Cluster collected, which Nutrition Cluster itself provides in its publicly available bimonthly reports.

The aggregated, weighted findings from the Nutrition Cluster show that although malnutrition rates were high, they never breached famine thresholds even at the peak period of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in July and August.........

© The Times of Israel