Famine by design, Silence by Choice: 90,000 children are dying and still the UN can't find it's Spine.

 

✍️ By Malik Mukhtar | July 22, 2025
📍 From the graveyard of global morality: Gaza

Let’s be clear. If a three-month-old baby named Yehia dies of starvation in his mother’s arms at Nasser Hospital, that should be enough for the world to say: “Enough.”
But in today’s U.N., apparently 90,000 malnourished children, daily starvation deaths, and food rotting at the Gaza border still don’t meet the “technical” threshold for famine.

Welcome to the age of data-driven genocide, where unless a corpse is tagged with the right IPC Level 5 barcode, it's not really dead enough to matter.

📉 No Data? No Problem. Just Ignore the Bones.

Let’s break this down.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — a bureaucratic tool forged in the fires of humanitarian intention — tells us that famine exists when:

• 20% of households face extreme food shortage,
• Acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30%,
• Deaths exceed 2 per 10,000 per day.

But wait — Gaza’s under siege, aid workers are blocked, journalists are banned, and no one can conduct the "official" fieldwork. So?
No data = No famine.
Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.

Isn’t it fascinating how the same world that livestreams drone strikes and AI-generated war simulations suddenly can’t “confirm” if babies are starving?

Here’s a suggestion: maybe Michael Fakhri, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, and Francesca Albanese — UN experts who called it famine a year ago — should've installed GoPros on every skeletal child for the sake of validation.

🎩 The UN’s Delicate Dance of Cowardice

Let’s not pretend this is just about data.

It’s about politics, power, and paychecks.

UN leaders — from the Secretary-General down — know exactly what’s happening in Gaza. They’ve read the reports. They’ve seen the footage. They’ve heard the cries.
But they also know what happens when you displease the U.S. Congress or whisper the word “genocide” too loud.
You get defunded.
You get sanctioned.
You get smeared.

And so, they do nothing — or worse, they wait.

Wait for more deaths.
Wait for permission.
Wait for the moment when declaring famine is so embarrassingly obvious, it becomes a formality.

🍽️ Starvation as a Weapon, and Silence as a Strategy

Let’s not mince words.

This is a man-made famine, crafted with intent, designed to break a people not just with bombs but with hunger.
Since March 2, Israel has blockaded humanitarian aid, bombed convoys, gunned down starving civilians at aid points, and declared war on food itself.

More than 900 Palestinians have been killed at aid distribution sites. And still, the UN can’t summon the courage to declare what the world can see with its own eyes.

Why?

Because famine, once declared, demands a response.
Because famine, when official, makes denial impossible and complicity visible.

And perhaps most inconvenient of all — famine is a war crime under Article 8 of the ICC Statute. And we can’t have that… especially when the perpetrator is a "democracy."

📦 Food is Wasting. Children are Wasting. And the UN is Wasting Time.

On July 20 alone, 19 Palestinians starved to death — in a single day.
One million children are at risk.
Food trucks are rotting in the Sinai because Israel says no.
And the UN? Still checking its charts, still calibrating its courage.

If this isn’t famine, then words have lost their meaning.

If this isn’t enough, then we should all admit:
This isn’t about thresholds. This is about thresholds of shame.

🕊️ Final Word: Declare It, or Bury the UN’s Conscience With Gaza’s Children

It’s no longer about what the IPC says or what data is missing. It’s about what humanity demands.

Declare the famine.
Declare the crime.
Declare, at the very least, that Palestinian lives — and deaths — matter.

Because history will remember what the UN refused to declare.
And those who died waiting for words will become the loudest testimony against a world that watched them starve — in silence.

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Sources & References:

• Moncef Khane, Al Jazeera Opinion, July 21, 2025
• UN Human Rights Council Statements, July 9, 2024
• World Food Programme Reports, July 2025
• Gaza Ministry of Health: Starvation Death Data
• Francesca Albanese, Michael Fakhri, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN Experts Panel
• ICC Rome Statute, Article 8
• Reuters, AFP, UNRWA briefings