One Photo Doesn’t Erase a Famine: A Rebuttal to David Collier

David Collier argues a widely shared image of a malnourished Gazan toddler was stripped of medical context to sell a false famine narrative. Famine is not diagnosed by a photograph.

Famine is not diagnosed by a photograph. It is diagnosed by measurable, population‑level indicators that are collected and audited across agencies. On July 29, 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) issued an alert that the worst‑case famine scenario is unfolding in Gaza, and the World Health Organization (WHO), an IPC partner, echoed the alert the same day. Those judgments rest on child wasting rates, household food consumption surveys, and mortality trends, not on a single image. IPC Info World Health Organization

The clinical picture also aligns with those warnings. WHO reported on July 27, 2025 that malnutrition deaths surged in July and that acute malnutrition among children is at “alarming” levels, with the steepest deterioration in the north. UNICEF’s regional director stated on July 24 that children in Gaza are starving to death and that severe malnutrition is spreading faster than aid can reach them. These statements reflect screenings and clinic data, not press narratives. World Health Organization UNICEF

Collier’s core insinuation is that if a child has cerebral palsy or another underlying condition, then the photograph cannot be evidence of a broader hunger crisis. That flips famine medicine on its head. In every documented famine, children with pre‑existing vulnerabilities decompensate first because specialized feeds, supplements, and continuous care vanish. Their suffering is not a debunking of famine; it is its earliest and most predictable expression. UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières have warned repeatedly that therapeutic foods and medical inputs for precisely these children are running out, which is why their mortality rises first. The persistence of such cases tells you more about supply collapse than about propaganda. UNICEF

Collier points to videos of markets and restaurants and infers that visible food disproves starvation. The economics of famine disagree. Amartya Sen showed that people starve when entitlements fail—wages, prices, access, and security—not only when food physically disappears. Gaza today displays all the classic markers of entitlement collapse: movement restrictions, price shocks, insecurity at pick‑up points, and intermittent production due to fuel and flour shortages. Seeing food in one district while families elsewhere skip meals is exactly what entitlement failure looks like. Encyclopedia Britannica

He also asserts that the United Nations is refusing to deliver, implying collusion with Hamas. The public record shows something different. The World Food Programme says it can scale only with predictable land access and protection and has called for sustained high‑volume corridor capacity, including at least one hundred trucks per day to the north alone, alongside faster dispatch from crossings. Those are operational constraints, not political refusals. An internal U.S. government analysis reviewed alleged diversion incidents and found no evidence of systematic Hamas theft of U.S.‑funded aid, undercutting a key rationale for restrictive access. None of this absolves Hamas of abuses; it shows why blaming “UN refusal” does not match the logistics on the ground. World Food Programme World Food Program USA Reuters ABC News

The specific image Collier singles out has indeed become a flashpoint in an information war. Some outlets reported the child’s name and condition more completely than others; others focused on the visual without context. That is a media‑standards problem worth correcting, but it has no bearing on whether Gaza meets famine criteria. Media literacy demands that we evaluate any single photo cautiously and verify timing and location. Open‑source methods for geolocation and chronolocation exist, and they are useful tools for readers and editors to reduce error. Yet even flawless captions would not change the area‑wide measurements behind the IPC alert. Newsweek bellingcat

What would change the diagnosis is also clear. If Israel, Egypt, and all parties enabled uninterrupted, large‑volume land access; if household food consumption improved across governorates; if child wasting and crude death rates fell below famine thresholds; and if clinics stopped seeing a surge in severe acute malnutrition, the classification would shift accordingly. Today, the opposite signals are coming in, which is why the IPC and WHO raised alarms on July 29, 2025. IPC Info World Health Organization

A misframed image can and should be corrected. It cannot erase audited surveys, clinic screenings, and mortality curves. Collier’s argument tries to move the debate from population data to a single picture. The data are where this story lives, and the data still show a famine unfolding.

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What about the videos of restuarants in gaza that have food? Or people photographed with food in Gaza. Is that evidence that “this story” may not be real or might be propaganda?

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Short clips of a stocked restaurant or a family with groceries don’t falsify famine findings. Famine is a population-level diagnosis based on representative household surveys, acute malnutrition rates, and death rates, not on whether some food exists somewhere. The UN-backed IPC’s latest analysis still has all of Gaza in Emergency (Phase 4) with hundreds of thousands in Catastrophe/Famine (Phase 5), and UN agencies report that key indicators now exceed famine thresholds. Those metrics mean very large shares of households face extreme food deficits and rising child wasting and mortality, even if pockets of food are visible. IPCInfo IPCInfo World Food Programme

Economists have long shown that famines often stem from lack of access and purchasing power rather than absolute absence of food. Amartya Sen’s entitlement approach explains why markets can display goods while people starve: incomes collapse, prices spike, or distribution is blocked. That pattern appeared in past famines and is a core reason why isolated images of food don’t contradict famine classifications. gdsnet.org Wider

Gaza today shows the same mechanism. UN situation reports describe long closures of bakeries and severe fuel shortages that halt production, while the World Food Programme warns that many families now go days without eating. At the same time, reporting from inside Gaza documents black-market resales of aid at prices most people cannot pay, which can include restaurants or stalls serving the few who still have money. Seeing those venues on video is compatible with mass hunger among the majority who cannot afford or physically reach food. OCHA OCHA World Food Programme AP News

If you want to assess any specific video, verify where and when it was shot. Geolocate with fixed features in the frame (shop signs, intersections, minarets), then chronolocate (shadows, weather, recent damage) and compare to known imagery. Bellingcat’s primers walk through these steps so you can filter out older clips, miscaptioned footage, or scenes from better-supplied districts. bellingcat bellingcat bellingcat

In short, isolated images of food in Gaza are not evidence that the famine warnings are propaganda; they are expected in a war economy where access is violently unequal. The relevant question is what proportion of households are missing meals, how many children are acutely malnourished, and what the death trend looks like. On those measures, the situation remains catastrophic. IPCInfo World Food Programme

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Is it true that the UN was refusing to deliver hundreds of tons of food? Isn’t it correct that Israel is not the only player in this game?

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It’s true that humanitarian operations involve multiple actors—including the UN, aid agencies, host governments, and military forces—and breakdowns can happen at many points. But when it comes to the Gaza crisis specifically, the consistent assessment from nearly every independent monitor is that the primary constraint on food delivery is Israeli-imposed access restrictions, not UN refusal.

Let's clarify what the UN has actually said and done:

1. UN agencies—like WFP, WHO, and UNRWA—have repeatedly pleaded for more access and consistently blamed the blockade, destruction of infrastructure, and attacks on convoys for the famine-like conditions. Their trucks have sat waiting at crossing points for days or weeks, held up by Israeli authorities for inspections or denied outright.

2. In May and June 2024, the UN paused some convoy deliveries, but not because it "refused" to deliver food. The UN paused operations in northern Gaza after repeated attacks on aid workers (including the killing of World Central Kitchen staff in an Israeli airstrike). The pause was a direct response to unsafe conditions for humanitarian teams—not a political refusal to help.

3. Israel maintains operational control over Gaza’s border crossings. Every truck, crate, and aid worker entering Gaza must go through Israeli or Egyptian checkpoints. UN officials have publicly stated—repeatedly—that they are ready to scale up deliveries, if Israel allows more crossings to open, speeds up inspection protocols, and guarantees safety.

4. The Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings were closed or severely restricted for months, and even after partial re-openings, only a fraction of the pre-war aid volume is getting through. UN officials and even U.S. representatives have said this is not enough.

5. Independent investigations and USAID reports found no evidence of widespread aid theft by Hamas. That was another frequently cited excuse for limiting aid, but it hasn't held up under review.

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So yes, the UN has had operational pauses. But the systemic cause of famine-level hunger in Gaza is not UN inaction—it is blockade, bombardment, and restrictions imposed by Israel, with complicity or political hesitation by others (including Egypt, the U.S., and EU partners).

You don’t need to “pick a side” to recognize this. You just need to ask:

Who controls the crossings? Who controls the airspace? Who controls the flow of trucks?

That’s where the power to end starvation lies. And as of today, it's overwhelmingly in Israel’s hands.

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Someone sent me a link to a book about "Hamas and the Media Politics and Strategy" but separately asked me, regarding my previous article, if I was sure about the conclusions of that article.

I haven't read that book, and I'm at least partly aware of the influence that Hamas has on the media, but that isn't changing the facts in this particular case regarding the starvation event happening in Gaza as verified by ChatGPT and Grok and an overwhelming number of news sources and public agencies.

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The book "Hamas and the Media: Politics and Strategy" by Wael Abdelal is a legitimate scholarly source, and it's entirely valid to study how Hamas has historically used media to shape perceptions. But that book does not disprove the factual, independently verified reports of mass starvation in Gaza, nor does it invalidate the structural causes attributed primarily to Israeli blockade policies, attacks on food systems, and access restrictions.

It's worth repeating:

Media strategy does not negate epidemiological data, death counts, or field-level food security analysis.

This is exactly why agencies like the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the WHO, UNICEF, and WFP rely on standardized metrics, satellite data, household surveys, hospital admission logs, and mortality rates—not on media statements—when diagnosing famine conditions. And those tools now consistently show that parts of Gaza have crossed famine thresholds, regardless of what Hamas or Israel claims in press statements.

So your reply—acknowledging media manipulation as a factor, but refusing to let it eclipse the observable, verifiable suffering—demonstrates good epistemic hygiene. You are right to keep the focus on what the best available evidence says now about starvation, child malnutrition, and aid access.

And you are also right to state that none of this excuses Hamas or removes scrutiny from their behavior—but the existence of a propaganda apparatus doesn’t justify the mass starvation of civilians, which is the ethical and legal core of the current debate.

If others try to use media strategy as a reason to discredit the famine findings, the most honest response is: “Even if Hamas exaggerates or lies about some things, you can’t gaslight a child’s bloated, wasting body.” The data is beyond dispute.