The publication by Israel of a resounding refutation of a United Nations-backed determination that famine stalks Gaza is a moment to mark. It reminds that the battle over facts is no less worth waging than the one with tanks. The accusation that the Jewish state is starving Gaza is a lie. Now Israel has, by our lights, delivered a decisive rejoinder in a call for retraction from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee.

That mouthful is the body that, in a report issued last month, reckoned that Israel is responsible for an “entirely man-made famine” and that “starvation is present and rapidly spreading” in the Strip. The committee notes that “suffering has not only persisted but intensified and spread until famine has begun to emerge.” This is the first time that famine has ever been officially discovered in the Middle East.  

The pushback comes from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. It  is responsible for civilian affairs at the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its report determines that the IPC dispatch is “flawed and tendentious, consistently repeating — and failing to correct — obvious errors.” The only people being intentionally starved are the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Israel contends that the IPC has “declared a famine despite evidence to the contrary. … This is not to minimize the very real hardships faced by the civilian population in Gaza.” The Jewish state is “making immense efforts to mitigate these hardships, paying a heavy price in terms of imposing limitations on operations and providing resources, financial as well as material, to a criminal adversary that thrives on the diversion and monetization of aid.”

Israel reckons that the IPC’s standard as applied to Israel was anonymously “permissive,” flagging “six times as many cases as famine” as compared to its usual benchmark. The crucial dataset, Jerusalem declares, was “riddled with major methodological violations, distortions, and misrepresentations — bordering on outright fraud.” Members of the IPC  “disseminated Iranian regime propaganda, supported Russian aggression against Ukraine, defended the Houthis,” and supported the massacre by Hamas.

COGAT argues that more than 10,000 trucks of aid have entered Gaza since May and that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an alternative to UN aid distribution, has delivered more than 2.2 million relief packages. Some 90 percent of UN trucks are diverted by Hamas, armed gangs, or mobs. COGAT maintains: “The international community must not be swept away by false narratives and unfounded propaganda.” 

“False narratives and unfounded propaganda” could be an apt description of the modi operandi of Hamas and its enablers. Israel’s diagnosis is that a “preconceived determination to declare famine in Gaza” drove the IPC to ignore the evidence, skew the standards, and act from a presumption of guilt. The same baleful process is at play when, say, the press promotes images of Gazan children afflicted by tragic illnesses as if they are solely Israel’s victims.

Or take the “genocide” libel, which along with the “famine canard” are the tentpoles of the efforts to defame the Jewish state. Earlier this month the International Association of Genocide Scholars reckoned that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.” The Times lauded the association as “a leading group of academic experts” and the secretary-general of the UN called it “a very prominent and serious organization.”

Not quite. For a mere $30 anyone could join, meaning that accounts as varied as “Adolf Hitler,” “The Cookie Monster,” and “Emperor Palpatine” all had a say on the genocide question. Now, it appears as if the famine issue is being likewise twisted. This all-fired rush to make Israel guilty of every crime harms first the Jewish state, but ultimately, as Jerusalem notes, the “vulnerable populations” who will suffer from all this squandered credibility.