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The Food Situation in Gaza Is More Complicated Than What’s Being Reported

Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

It’s important to preface the following with an acknowledgment that food insecurity at any level should not be taken lightly, and that every civilian death is a tragedy. It’s also important to emphasize the following:

  1. Hamas is exploiting Gazan civilians, because it is in their interest to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
  2. They have also managed to convince the world that Israel is responsible and have removed themselves from the narrative.
  3. The international media is playing along.
  4. Even when the IDF took real action, including a press tour to see all of the aid waiting to be picked up for distribution and a subsequent aid air-drop, the aid waiting at the border was barely covered and the media narrative did not change.

Claims of mass starvation in Gaza are being misrepresented by major media outlets, often based on Hamas-supplied narratives and without sufficient fact-checking or context. Images of children — skin and bones — are now appearing across Western media, blaming the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and Israel for the hunger crisis.

Of course, images like these evoke emotion. It’s also not surprising that people would stand against Israel or Israeli operations in Gaza. But the media leave out this fact: Hamas controls the narrative, and the UN refuses to cooperate with Israel and the GHF, because it also has an interest in furthering that narrative. That means refusing to find a solution that bypasses Hamas.

So, What’s Really Happening on the Ground?

First and foremost, let’s begin with this fresh video proof of Hamas terrorists in one of their underground tunnels, enjoying plentiful amounts of food while civilians above ground suffer, and Israeli hostages are tortured and starved:

In response to claims by the UN and others that aid is not being let into Gaza, the IDF’s unit for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) posted this clip on their X account on Tuesday:

UN aid, 950 truckloads of it to be exact, had been left to rot on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing, and the UN’s story constantly contradicts itself.

Two days after the video was released online, exposing the UN for putting politics before people, the UN and other organizations began collecting boxes from the crossing — prompting updates on re-openings of food kitchens across the Strip. There are now reports of around 400 truckloads left waiting to be picked up.

Documents belonging to the The World Food Programme (WFP), a UN aid organization, show that Israel is trying to work with the UN to facilitate aid entry into Gaza. It is also clear that aid trucks are getting looted.

The Israeli authorities report that there is no limit at on the number of trucks that can be manifested. Trucks are permitted to bring cargo to crossings so long as there is capacity to collect the cargo inside Gaza.

Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst reveals more about negotiations between Israel and the UN:

On Thursday, the IDF hosted a group of international press workers at the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing to see the aid waiting to be picked up:

The Media Echo-Chamber

On Sunday morning, Israel announced that air drops of humanitarian aid, in coordination with Jordan and the UAE, backed by the UK had begun. The media were quick to criticize.

The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, for one, emphasizing that it is a last-resort option and he claims, there are still other options:

Air dropping aid is an act of desperation. It can also look good on television, and spread a feel-good factor that something, at last, is being done.

While his argument about aid drops being dangerous hold merit, there clearly is desperation, and clearly this is Israel showing that it is making every attempt possible to facilitate aid. This is not to create a “feel-good factor.” With all due respect to Bowen, this may be the most efficient and quickest way to deliver aid at the current moment.

But it seems that no matter what is done to try to facilitate aid distribution, the media and the UN for that matter, find a reason why it is inhumane or not good enough. There are complaints about driving it through Gaza (as their trucks are looted), there are condemnations over asking Gazans to come to aid centers to pick up aid themselves, and the US’ temporary pier that brought in tons of aid, which ended up being a wasted effort, as most of it just sat there to rot because aid organizations also refused to pick it up.

Media coverage following the press visit to the Kerem Shalom crossing was also abysmal by outlets like The Telegraph, dismissing every single Israeli comment as either casting doubt, or ignoring the facts on the ground — that the UN denied assistance from both the IDF and the GHF.

From the first sentence, the legitimacy of the clip is questioned:

Israel has given a tour of a large storage site within Gaza containing what it claims to be 1,000 lorries-worth of aid that the United Nations (UN) has failed to deliver.

But when it comes to the UN response to Israel’s video? Dujarric also claimed that there is a “lack of willingness” by Israel to allow the UN to do its “work”:
But the UN has said that, in practice, Israel is not facilitating the distribution of its aid in Gaza.
Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesman, said the country was imposing “tremendous bureaucratic impediments” and “tremendous security impediments.”

And then completely closing its eyes to the fact that the UN can’t deliver its aid without help, and again, won’t cooperate with Israel”:

The full details of why the UN and its NGO partners are unable to deliver aid into Gaza are not clear.
But it is believed that the organisation had to adapt its delivery routes and methods from its traditional patterns because of the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation, and that Israel is not facilitating this on the ground.

NBC for its part, completely ignored the hundreds of truckloads sitting at the border, choosing instead to put the blame on Israel rather than address the UN’s failure by giving misguided explainers on “delayed convoys” and “chaotic and often obstructive conditions”:

Aid agencies say they would like to deliver aid, but that Israel has riddled the process with delays and denials, changing schedules and routes, sometimes at the last minute, making it difficult or impossible to safely retrieve the aid for distribution.

This final line in the piece just adds to the questionable reporting. They refer to the Hamas-run police as a legitimate “police-force” — as if it was there to provide security to aid convoys rather than steal it.

Gaza’s police force was also more present and provided security, but months of Israeli bombing have crippled the police and increased desperation among the public.

The BBC ignored the latest developments all together.

As for the hunger crisis itself, The New York Times and NBC were disappointing to say the least.

The New York Times has no qualms about parroting Hamas propaganda filtered through aid agencies and rights groups, blaming the crisis in Gaza on Israel, and not on Hamas, its own ruling power that hoards food and supplies from its population.

In a joint statement released on Wednesday, more than 100 aid agencies and rights groups said Gaza was facing “widespread starvation” and called on Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid.

As previously mentioned, the WFP documented that Israel had no restrictions on aid.

Or NBC’s report on six-week old Youssef al-Safadi, who reportedly died of malnutrition, and the greater spread of starvation in the Gaza Strip. The article both blames Israel and erases Hamas from the conflict.

Israel lifted its blockade in late May but has since allowed only limited aid into the enclave, and Gaza’s population continues to faces dire shortages of basic necessities.

Additionally, the quote above contradicts what was written in WFP’s document about Israel’s efforts to remove any limits of aid entry across whichever border is needed.

The article also managed to shift responsibility for any starvation away from Hamas, rather than explain that Hamas steals, hoards, and up-charges aid.

Doctors and aid groups have warned of a hunger crisis now reaching a climax in the besieged Palestinian enclave under Israeli military assault. Four children were among 15 people who died from severe malnutrition in just 24 hours, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Tuesday. The ministry said Wednesday that another 10 people had died of malnutrition.

Here Israel and GHF statements that aid is indeed coming through the border have been dismissed by using unfounded statements from doctors that no aid is coming in?

There’s just no food,” said Burgos, who is working at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and volunteering with the medical NGO Glia. “There is just nothing getting in, hasn’t been getting in for months.”

And finally, no mention of why the UN aid hadn’t been picked up from the border and distributed as it was meant to. Not only are there aid trucks on the Gaza-side of the border, but Hamas warehouses full of UN aid are being looted.

Food has arrived, it’s just not made available to civilians. It’s important to note that Hamas is also making attaining GHF aid a dangerous endeavor. There are reports of terrorists beating, shooting, and stealing aid from hungry people.

The list of problematic media coverage goes on. How does this work? When Palestinians in Gaza are suffering and the world sees, pressure is placed on Israel by the international community to end the war, thus enabling Hamas to have more leverage in negotiations.

The “Evidence” of Gaza Blindness

There is a horrific famine happening in Sudan, with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reporting famine level hunger in North Darfur IDP camps and the Nuba mountains since 2024. It’s affecting hundreds of thousands, with millions at “phase 3” food insecurity levels or higher, but the media give it half the attention it gives Gaza or even less.

Here are the media mentions (over the last year) of the words “Sudan” and famine related terms across all types of media and all outlets — and then “Gaza” with the same parameters. Filters were set to include all mentions across the web:

Sudan

Gaza

How is Sudan’s humanitarian crisis so underreported and ignored compared to Gaza’s, when 24.6 million Sudanese people are suffering from acute hunger levels?

The answer? Hamas is lurking in the shadows of media lies. Evidently, Gaza is a twilight zone — almost as if it exists in a parallel media reality where logic and truth are blurred. Readers must be able to see past the picture and into the truth, but in order to do that, the media must regain integrity and ask the hard questions. Which party is the real obstacle and could end this war today? Hamas.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post The Food Situation in Gaza Is More Complicated Than What’s Being Reported first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Jews, Israelis Targeted in Austria Amid Surge in Antisemitic Incidents; Local Jewish Community Calls for Action

Illustrative: Pro-Palestinian protesters shout slogans and hold flags during a demonstration against Israel’s military action in the Gaza strip, in Vienna, July 20, 2014. Photo: REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger

Austria is facing a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel rhetoric, prompting outrage from the country’s Jewish community and urgent calls for authorities to take swift action against growing anti-Jewish hatred.

On Saturday, a group of pro-Palestinian activists burst into the opening of the Salzburg Festival — one of the world’s premier events for opera, music, and drama — waving Palestinian flags and shouting antisemitic slogans.

As Austrian Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler began his opening speech at the event, six individuals stormed the stage, aggressively waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Blood on your hands!” along with other antisemitic slurs.

The incident raised alarming questions about the event’s security, as the six protesters gained easy access while wearing fake, misspelled staff IDs with fictitious names, revealing a clear failure in background checks.

According to festival director Lukas Crepaz, security measures and control checks have been significantly strengthened. The six activists were arrested, and authorities continue to investigate the incident.

Elie Rosen, president of the Jewish Community (IKG) of Salzburg, Styria, and Carinthia, condemned the incident, calling the disruption of the Salzburg Festival’s opening a “targeted political provocation, carried by openly anti-Israel rhetoric.”

“Jewish life in Austria must not become the collateral damage of political agitation,” Rosen said in a statement. “We often hear powerful statements at commemorative events condemning antisemitism.”

“But where are Israel’s outspoken supporters when real solidarity is needed? Antisemitism takes many forms and frequently starts with the silence of the majority,” she continued. “Hatred toward Israel is not a legitimate form of protest.”

In a separate incident last week, an Israeli couple was denied access to a campsite in Ehrwald, a village in western Austria, after attempting to make a reservation to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

According to local media, the couple attempted to register at the campsite, but after revealing their Israeli passports, they were denied entry and asked to leave, forcing them to find alternative accommodations.

“We have no place for Jews here,” the campsite operator reportedly told them.

When asked for comment, the campsite operators told the German newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, “These people should much rather take care of the many children in Gaza. Otherwise, there is nothing to say.”

In another incident last week, a group of well-known Israeli classical musicians reported being refused service at a pizzeria in Vienna after staff overheard them speaking Hebrew.

One of the musicians recounted that while they were ordering their food, the waiter asked them which language they were speaking. When they replied Hebrew, the waiter allegedly told them, “In that case, leave. I’m not serving you food.”

“The initial shock and humiliation were profound. But what struck us even more deeply was what came next – or rather what didn’t. The people around us were clearly startled, some offered sympathetic glances … and then, quietly, they went back to their dinners, their conversations, their wine – as though nothing had happened,” one of the musicians wrote in a post on X.

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‘All of Our Strength’: Over 1,000 Pro-Israel Activists Gather in DC for Solidarity Conference

2025 Israel on Campus Coalition National Leadership Summit. Photo: ICC.

Over 1,000 Jewish students, faculty, and activists amassed in Washington, DC on July 27-29 to attend the Israel on Campus Coalition’s annual National Leadership Summit (NLS), an electric event which achieved creating the atmosphere of both a festival of Jewish elation and an academic conference.

Founded in 2002, the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) is a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as inspiring college students to defend and hold pride in the state of Israel. One of its major initiatives is the “microgrants” program, which helps pro-Israel campus groups organize events about Israeli culture and society. Another, the ICC Community Impact Fellowship, awards college students a $1,000 stipend for completing a leadership seminar in which they are trained in civic engagement, coalition building, and rapidly responding to antisemitic and anti-Israel events on their campuses.

Demand for a spot at this year’s 2025 conference exceeded the nonprofit’s capacity to host the thousands of students who signed up to be a conferee at what is recognized as the largest gathering of pro-Israel students in the country. Hundreds were waitlisted and encouraged to reapply next year. Those whom ICC did select were flown out to DC and billeted at the Capital Hilton, all expenses paid. They were joined – for the first time ever – by a delegation of faculty from the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) and staff from most major Jewish organization in the US, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to StandWithUs (SWU).

“We just ultimately believe that we’re better when we use all of our strength as a movement,” ICC chief executive Jacob Baime told The Algemeiner on Monday during an interview. “And we’re not the only ones who feel that way. The other side does as well, having mounted a highly professionalized coalition, well-funded, well-coordinated effort with many groups involved. We need our partners and the different perspectives they hold too.”

When The Algemeiner last attended NLS, the world was not yet one year removed from Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, the deadliest day in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust. Jewish students and ICC staff, many of whom have family members and friends who were affected by the atrocities or were later drafted into the war it precipitated, were still laboring to comprehend what had become a new and unprecedented world – one in which classic antisemitic tropes had resurfaced to corrupt public debate, anti-Jewish violence occurred daily across the world, and anti-Zionist groups were taking over college campuses and converting them into outposts of antisemitic hate.

As such the event aimed to inspire Jewish students “take back the campus,” an effort advanced by an infantry of social media influencers.

This year’s NLS leaned more heavily into supplying students with information, facts, and statistics curated and presented by the most accomplished Middle East scholars, government leaders, and nonprofit executives in the global pro-Israel community. Social media influencers and celebrities took the stage as well, showcasing their strengths as spirited advocates who remind students why the issues under discussion relate to their contemporary experiences as young people and consumers.

Speakers included Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; Col. Miri Eisin of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute; Miriam Elman of the Academic Engagement Network; and Dr. Ayal Feinberg, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights. On offer as giveaways were Douglas Murray’s recently published polemic On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization and Dina Powell McCormick and David McCormick’s co-authored book, titled Who Believed in You?: How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World.

“We wanted students to engage with ideas that touch on the entirety of the campus ecosystem and the subjects they may be asked to comment on,” Baime explained to The Algemeiner. “Oct. 7, the war, and its aftermath have changed the American pro-Israel movement forever.”

The obverse side of the conference’s educational objectives was wholesome fun for the 800 college aged conferees in attendance. They were treated to a buoyant concert in the Hilton’s Presidential Ballroom featuring the jazz-pop fusion act “All of the Above” and the rapper Duvbear, an 18-year-old who is emblematic of what Generation-Z calls “rizz.” Celebrities such as former NBA player Meta World Peace, former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, and professional boxer George Foreman III afforded the students quick meet and greets and selfies. Capital Hilton staff carted out pounds of food – Latin, Asian, and Kosher – from its kitchens every several hours, fostering opportunities for socializing and being photographed on an ICC-themed “red carpet.”

University of California, Davis rising junior Toby Jacob told The Algemeiner that the nonprofit’s strength is its staff.

“The staff here is so knowledgeable and so capable,” Jacob said. “It can feel really scary when you’re dealing with these like large scale issues in your student government, with your administration – and to have people who have the resources to walk you through it is vital.”

Tessa Veksler, an NLS 2025 moderator who became the most recognizable pro-Israel activist of Generation-Z after being elected the first Shabbat-observant president of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s student government, agreed.

“When I was on campus going through the worst of the worst, I knew that ICC had my back and that I could count on the staff and the organization to be there at a moment’s notice,” Veksler said. “They exceptionally equip students with the tools to be able to lead themselves, and so there is an expectation that if you are an ICC fellow that you take the tools ICC gives and put in the work to go and become involved in student government and be the person to make the impact.”

She continued, “It’s a remarkable thing, and there’s a reason why I have stayed as involved as I am.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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‘Devastated’: Wesley LePatner, Killed in Manhattan Mass Shooting, Was a Jewish Communal, Philanthropic Leader

A man holding a rifle walks into an office building at 345 Park Avenue shortly before a shooting that killed several people, in the Midtown Manhattan district of New York City, US, July 28, 2025, in a still image taken from surveillance video. Photo: Surveillance Camera/Handout via REUTERS

Wesley LePatner, an executive at Blackstone and a Jewish communal leader, was one of the victims of the mass shooting in Midtown Manhattan on Monday that killed four people and wounded a fifth in addition to the shooter, who died by suicide.

LePatner, 43, was an active member of the Jewish community and served on the UJA Federation of New York’s board of directors, which said it is “devastated by the tragic loss.”

“Wesley was extraordinary in every way — personally, professionally, and philanthropically,” the federation wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “An exceptional leader in the financial world, she brought thoughtfulness, vision, and compassion to everything she did. In 2023, we honored her with the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award at our Wall Street Dinner, recognizing her commitment to our community and her remarkable achievements, all the more notable as a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field.”

In her acceptance speech, LePatner said, “Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be up on this stage two decades later [after attending her first UJA Wall Street dinner]. UJA has many super-powers, but its most important in my view is its power to create a sense of community and belonging, and that ability to create a sense of community and belonging matters now more than ever.”

She also explained that “UJA stepped in early and fixed my feeling out of place by connecting me with senior Goldman Sachs women who were further along in their careers and personal lives, but equally committed to their Jewish community and identity.”

“I was an American,” she said, “but I was first and foremost Jewish.”

LePatner was also a supporter of Israel, leading a solidarity mission with UJA after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

“In the wake of Oct. 7, Wesley led a solidarity mission with UJA to Israel, demonstrating her enduring commitment in Israel’s moment of heartache,” the UJA Federation of New York said in its statement. “She lived with courage and conviction, instilling in her two children a deep love for Judaism and the Jewish people.”

In addition to serving on the board of directors of the New York UJA, she was also on the board of trustees at The Abraham Joshua Heschel School — a pluralistic Jewish day school in New York. The Forward reported that school representatives wrote in an email that “there are no right words for this unfathomable moment of pain and loss.”

“It was a rare z’chut, a rare privilege, to know Wesley and to learn from her. She was a uniquely brilliant and modest leader and parent, filled with wisdom, empathy, vision, and appreciation,” they continued.

David Greenfield, CEO of the Met Council, posted on X that “Wesley was an amazing person who was also tremendously talented leader. She volunteered with her kids [at the Met Council] to feed those in need.”

LePatner graduated from Yale summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and met her husband on the first day of school in 1999.

She is survived by her husband and two children.

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