Latest UN and Media Anti-Israel Gaza Hoax: “14,000 Babies That Will Die in the Next 48 Hours”

Latest UN and Media Anti-Israel Gaza Hoax: “14,000 Babies That Will Die in the Next 48 Hours”

In the coming days, we will be learning more about the motivation of the alleged DC Jewish Museum murderer Elias Rodriguez. His antizionism is obvious, but the timing of the atrocity raises additional questions about the connection between blood libels and domestic terror.

One day prior to the murder, the media was abuzz with a fantastic accusation of Jewish wickedness — the claim that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza and that 14,000 babies would die of hunger within 48 hours.

The claim originated with the United Nations. As Times of Israel reported:

Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, claimed yesterday on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” show: “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them. I want to save as many as these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.

The numbers defied logic — how can so many babies die so quickly in a population of just two million? And since it’s been more than 48 hours now — where are the 14,000 dead babies? If so many were in danger of imminent death, surely some of them already passed.

Ridiculous as it was, the line was immediately picked up by the BBC, PBS, NBC — the latter helpfully used an unsourced picture of a starving brown baby to add further urgency to Fletcher’s statement — and many other outlets. Social media erupted with self-righteous outrage — and violent threats. According to Jewish Onliner, engagement with the words 14,000 and babies “reach[ed] 4.5 billion potential views in just 24 hours”.

The libel was a success because the idea that Israel is inducing famine intuitively made sense to large swaths of the public — such accusations are not new. A mere week after the Simchat Torah Massacre in Southern Israel, when the Jewish state was still counting bodies and hundreds of hostages were victimized by Gaza cruelties, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed concern that “nearly a million children” can starve in the enclave. She was deploying the already cemented media narrative — from the onset of the war, starving Gazans became the principal trope with which influencers and journalists constructed the war coverage. The information about the alleged starvation came from Hamas-linked NGOs and journalists, as the British writer Douglas Murray memorably noted during his Joe Rogan debate, never bothered to travel to Israel and observe the food trucks coming into the war zone.

The stories about starvation and humanitarian crisis were too numerous to refute and were echoed by everyone including President Trump — albeit he squarely put the blame on Gaza’s terror leadership — and Pope Leo XIV. The only thing that was new about the 14,000 babies hoax is the sense of urgency — the precious babies were to perish within hours.

Albeit propagandists tried to pass pictures of chronically ill children for evidence of malnourishment, there was never any photographic documentation of mass starvation. In fact, Gazans in news footage continue looking extremely well fed — often gaining weight as they film themselves complaining about hunger. For the duration of the war, Gazans themselves have been uploading videos of cafes and markets that would be the envy of your average Soviet consumer.

Gazans’ own complains are frequently dubious. Take for instance, the recent trend lamenting the wrong carbohydrates. Al Jazeera reported that the area ran out of wheat, so residents started grinding pasta into flour. But why not cook pasta if you are hungry? Another Gaza influencer protested that the world is “very complicit” because his relatives are grinding pasta and “not having a good life”. That’s as fifty hostages are being slowly murdered in their dungeons.

Starvation hysteria is not innocuous — and it’s not just Jews who pay the price for the defamation. The Biden Administration attempted to build a pier to supply the area with aid — the $320 million project was quickly destroyed by tides and cost one of our servicemen his life. An employee of the American NGO World Central Kitchen was shot when traveling in a car mistakenly identified by the IDF as a Hamas vehicle.

Media advocacy group Honest Reporting noted that “math just isn’t mathing” in the Gaza famine narrative. There is plenty of aid coming into Gaza; it has enough to feed its entire population for eight months. The reports of famine “only count UN aid—and ignore private, national, and NGO shipments that make up most of the deliveries.” If supplies are tight in some areas, it’s because Hamas is hoarding the food to use aid as a tool of population control.

Hours after the 14,000 babies report, the UN walked back the libel. When pressed, it pointed to a study by a different UN department that projected 14,100 children possibly facing severe malnutrition in years to come if the situation in Gaza doesn’t change. As an aside, this will always be true of Gaza, a non-state entity that subsists almost entirely on international aid.

Soon after that clarification, PBS removed the post warning of large scale starvation. BBC qualified its original reporting and NBC first issued the correction that 14,000 babies “can” as opposed to “will” die within 48 hours — then deleted it. Unfortunately, the damage to Israel and the Jewish people will not be undone. We can and should make sure that the 14,000 babies phrase enters the American vernacular as a signifier of Palestinianism. Still, your average media user saw something bad about Israel out of the corner of his eye and will not bother to read the retractions.

The story about Jews being uniquely villainous — in this case deliberately causing the slow torturous demise of tens of thousands of innocents — is not new. Just like the blood libel of Damascus, it’s shrill and ugly. Americans should be concerned that even after the welcome demise of the USAID our tax money is used to subsidize organizations like the UN and certain media outlets that are used to disseminate hate.

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