[dlubarov]

3 million meals a day doesn't seem like a token gesture. It may not be enough, but GHF has been operating for less than a month and is still ramping up. You can criticize their implementation, but I don't see how you can deny that it's a serious effort to address food insecurity.

We've been hearing "risk of famine" almost since the start of the conflict, when the reality is 58 deaths linked to malnutrition during the conflict. Nigera has had over a million starvations in the same period, and even that isn't a famine. There's a real food insecurity problem, but we shouldn't call it something it's not.

[grafmax]

Now you’re dismissing all food scarcity concerns, including ignoring the recent intensification of food scarcity under the blockade, because supposedly a subset of humanitarian concerns expressed earlier in the genocide were overstated. But we have strong reason to believe famine is occurring today, thanks to the IPC reports, our most thorough picture of the food scarcity situation in Gaza, which show a consistently worsening picture, now tipping into famine thanks to the blockade.

To properly evaluate the GHF system we must note:

1) Israeli policy is to provide humanitarian gestures while perpetuating genocide.

2) Israeli policy manufactured this famine in the first place.

3) The GHF system is widely seen as inadequate and inhumane among humanitarian organizations. The inadequacy is corroborated by the IPC reports as I described in my last reply to you, providing token aid in the south that does not address the mass starvation in the north or Rafah.

4) Israeli military are continuing to block all aid except for the GHF stations under the control of the war machine.

5) GHF aid stations are the sites of frequent killings of starving civilians.

6) Mass starvation is occurring (again, we know this from our most thorough picture, the IPC reports).

Thus the purpose of the four GHF stations cannot be to significantly address starvation.

You claim that the stations will ramp up enough to stop the famine that Israel policy has created. However if we soberly assess the situation we must conclude that that scenario would be utterly inconsistent with the facts we have available.

[dlubarov]

I'm not dismissing food scarcity concerns, just asking that we use accurate language to describe them. You seem to maintain that a famine is occurring or probably occurring. I pointed out that starvations would need to be something like 4,000x higher for that to be true. Is your position that starvations are under-reported by some massive factor like 4,000x? Or that we should drastically relax the threshold of what we consider a famine in order to make the Gaza situation fit?

[grafmax]

I was using famine colloquially to mean mass starvation in a wide area. But your comment prompted me to educate myself more about the IPC classification system which depends on 1) 20% of the population face catastrophic food insecurity) 2) more than 30% of children face acute malnutrition and 3) 2 deaths per 10,000 per day (or 4 child deaths per 10,000 children per day) due starvation or malnutrition & disease.

The first two criteria are very likely met. The question is the third piece. Your position is that death rates reported from starvation are low so we have not met the third criteria.

There are a few issues with this argument.

1. it is excess mortality which constitutes famine, not deaths from starvation directly. Admittedly this metric is impossible to accurately determine in the current conditions in Gaza.

2. The starvation numbers we have are from a month ago, already out of date. Deaths in famine balloon, so we are not able to conclude that there is not famine today by IPC criteria. We do know that famine was imminent as of that report so this is a valid concern.

3. Excess mortality due to starvation numbers is what counts, and excess mortality is underreported. Reasons include such factors as poplulation displacements, or the fact that severe malnutrition comprises the immune system and as such deaths can be attributed to proximate causes (disease) rather than the distal cause of malnourishment.

4. The IPC report stated May 12 that famine is “imminent”.

An argument that IPC-defined famine may not be occurring is that the projections were for this period (May 11-September), and that imminent risk of famine may refer to any point during this period.

With all that in mind you are right at least that I should modulate my language. Mass starvation is occurring. We don’t know whether the third IPC criterion for famine is currently met. A better statement on my part would be that famine is imminent as of May 11 with a beginning expected some time between May 11-September, the famine may already be occurring, but we don’t know that the ballooning death rate has yet been triggered in this timeframe. Besides that, becoming aware of the famine (whether it has begun yet or not) won’t happen immediately considering the difficulties of gathering reliable excess mortality numbers in Gaza.