Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

For months, Western media outlets amplified one of the most dramatic accusations of the Israel–Hamas war: that Israel was causing famine in Gaza.

The IPC, a UN-backed hunger monitor that has been criticized for faulty methodology, published a report in August 2025, claiming that over half a million Gazans were already experiencing famine. The report was shared and repeated across major outlets with almost no scrutiny.

Headlines warned of “mass starvation,” photos of emaciated children (mostly with pre-existing conditions) filled front pages, and Israel was vilified as deliberately starving civilians.

But when new data emerged that undermined the entire famine narrative, those same outlets suddenly lost their desire to report.

The updated numbers, released in July-August by the Global Nutrition Cluster (GNC), a group of UN and other aid agencies, paint a starkly different picture.

The GNC found malnutrition rates roughly 23% lower than those used by the IPC. The highest rate measured was 11.9%, which is below the 15% malnutrition threshold that defines famine. This is not a minor revision. It is a total collapse of the most alarming claim made about Gaza’s humanitarian situation.

And yet, the media that treated the original IPC report as gospel did not cover this correction.

Not one major Western outlet ran a headline acknowledging that the famine claim had been based on flawed data. The story simply evaporated. No accountability. No follow-up. No explanation.

The Nutrition Cluster finally published the materials from their Sep 17 meeting, confirming that the IPC “analysis” was indeed based on fabricated data that misrepresented the raw, unweighted malnutrition statistics as if they were the properly age-weighted data required by IPC… https://t.co/WOk7RYOK3F pic.twitter.com/QQqfNNo41W

— Mark Zlochin – מארק זלוצ’ין༝ (@MarkZlochin) October 15, 2025

This silence matters.

The IPC’s famine declaration did not unfold in a vacuum. Its figures were used to hammer Israel diplomatically, spark UN condemnations, inflame protests, and put Jewish communities at risk worldwide.

Once “Israel is starving Gaza” became a viral talking point, it didn’t matter that Israeli officials and independent analysts questioned the report’s accuracy. It didn’t matter that key data was missing. It didn’t matter that the numbers were inconsistent or that the methodology was weak. What mattered was that the accusation fit the narrative, so it was believed.

Now we know more about those flaws. Critics pointed out that the IPC relied on incomplete datasets, pulled numbers from clinic-only screenings that do not represent the general population, and shifted to MUAC-only measurements — a quick arm-circumference test that is known to overestimate malnutrition. These issues were substantial enough to cast doubt on the entire famine declaration.

But instead of revisiting their own coverage, the same outlets that amplified the original claims chose to ignore the updated data. The famine panic was newsworthy; the correction, apparently, was not.

This is not just a journalistic failure. It’s a dangerous one. Once a humanitarian accusation of this scale is made, it becomes a weapon. It shapes protests, justifies threats, and fuels antisemitism. If the story collapses, but the media refuses to report it, the lie continues to live.

And this is exactly what happened.

Even as the GNC data undercut the famine claim, the global discourse remained stuck in August: Israel was still being accused of starving Gaza. The emotional imagery that accompanied the IPC report continues to circulate online. The outrage it generated still shapes public perception. The correction never got the same megaphone.

UN’s Gaza Famine Fraud Exposed:

IPC tested 15,700 kids for malnutrition in July and found 12%—below 15% famine threshold
Problematic. So what did they do?
Use a smaller incomplete 7,100 sample showing 16%
Solved. Now UN can claim famine in Gaza!

Evidence & sources: pic.twitter.com/Re1grOvGsQ

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) August 24, 2025

This should be a wake-up call. In conflict zones, information is a battlefield, and humanitarian terminology, like “famine,” “siege,” or “starvation,” can be misused for political ends. When journalists fail to interrogate their sources or revisit their own reporting, misinformation hardens into “truth.”

Readers should take note: if journalists won’t be skeptical, you must be. Every dramatic humanitarian claim warrants scrutiny. Every alarming statistic should be questioned. Every institution, even UN-affiliated bodies, must be held accountable for accuracy. Because if not, falsehoods travel, outrage spreads, and real people pay the price.

In this case, Israel’s reputation was smeared, global discourse was distorted, and Jewish communities were exposed to heightened risk, all based on data that didn’t hold up. And the media, which should have corrected the record, simply looked the other way.

So next time a headline declares catastrophe, treat it with the skepticism journalists should have shown in the first place.

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.

This article contains spoilers for Zootopia 2.

Since Zootopia 2 takes place in a world of talking animals, it might be the last place one would expect to find commentary on Israel and Palestine. But several viewers have read the film’s plot  — which concerns the division of Zootopia’s weather-controlled neighborhoods — as providing exactly that.

In this sequel to Disney’s 2016 animated hit, the sinister and wealthy Lynxley family plans to expand Tundratown, the part of the city where polar species reside, into Marsh Market. The Market is a home for already ostracized animals, such as aquatic mammals, and a hideout for reptiles, who were banished from the city. Because each neighborhood has a specific climate controlled by “weather walls,” the merging of one section with another would necessitate the immigration of those unable to live in the new climate.

The more powerful animals use a lot of hierarchical language referring to the “lower” or “lesser” species who would lose their homes because of this plan. Reptiles are also stigmatized as being “dangerous” due to a fatal incident a century earlier that involved a snake and a turtle. For viewers of the first film, which took on racial profiling, the existence of speciesism in the Zootopia-verse won’t come as a surprise. But what has captured viewers’ attention is the film’s discussion of the stolen Reptile Ravine neighborhood.

“Did Disney get tricked into making a pro-Palestine movie?” one user of the movie review platform Letterboxd wrote with their five-star rating. “Yes they did 🫡.”

Commenters under the review had mixed opinions:

“Do you seriously think a Zionist company made a pro-Palestine movie?” someone responded.

“Finally saw someone thinks so too, the ethnic cleaning theme is indeed pretty strong on this one,” said another user.

Some reviewers have also likened the plot to settler-colonialism, which feels like a bit of a stretch given that none of the animals in charge of the expansion travelled from one place to another in order to conquer it and therefore don’t really qualify as settlers. All of the contested land is already within the constituted borders of Zootopia, so the plan involves expanding the qualities of one neighborhood into another, not completely redrawing territorial boundaries.

A more apt comparison might be gentrification in American cities and the way that has impacted racial minorities. The buried reptile neighborhood feels more reminiscent of communities such as the San Juan Hill neighborhood in Manhattan that was eliminated by Lincoln Center or the Hayti community in Durham, North Carolina that was all but wiped out by a freeway and urban renewal. The accents, music, and general appearance of Marsh Market are clearly inspired by the American South, specifically the bayous of New Orleans, which have always been an important landmark in Black American culture.

Of course, it wouldn’t be wrong to also think of Palestinian towns that have been renamed and replaced with Israeli neighborhoods. And to get into the nitty gritty of gentrification versus settler-colonialism might seem futile — many activists and social scientists would probably tell you that despite being different strategies, they have the same oppressive result.

But why focus on Israel? Clearly, there are numerous examples of subjugation from across the world and across time that Zootopia 2 could be mirroring. Israel’s government is not the only entity to ever be accused of ethnic cleansing.

The focus on comparing the Lynxleys to Israel feels especially problematic in this case since the Lynxleys also operate the weather walls and are shown to secretly determine Zootopia politics. This would make the Lynxleys wealthy Jews who control the government and the weather.

Maybe because Israel and Palestine have taken over headlines, there is a recency bias influencing the comparisons people are making. It could also be because the star of Zootopia 2 has found herself at the center of controversy related to the recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last year, Ginnifer Goodwin, who voices the Zootopia protagonist Judy Hopps, was criticized for allegedly condemning the statement “globalize the intifada” as a threat to Jews and encouraging defunding UNRWA. Several months ago, that post was shared to a Boycott Divest Sanction subreddit, where users called for the boycott of Zootopia 2.

The post-credits scene of Zootopia 2 hints that avians will be at the center of a future film. Who knows how viewers will interpret the birds’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The post Why do people want ‘Zootopia 2’ to be about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.