On Aug. 1, Hamas released a video of Evyatar David, an Israeli kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and held in the dungeons of Gaza since that day. David was emaciated, practically a skeleton, and moved in slow motion. Near the end of the video, his captors show images of what we are to interpret as starving Palestinian children in Gaza. On the screen appears a message in English, Hebrew, and Arabic: “They eat what we eat. They drink what we drink.”

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The point was clear: If Palestinians in Gaza don’t eat, neither do the Israeli hostages.

But the next day, Hamas released a second video of David, and this one exposed the lie at the heart of the first. In the second video, we see a meaty arm hand David a can of beans, which the hostage explains is supposed to keep him alive for two days.

If Hamas were telling the truth when declaring, “They eat what we eat,” David would be fattened up from his captivity. Indeed, everyone should be so lucky to eat as Hamas eats — throughout the war, Hamas has flaunted its access to food and to the United Nations facilities that store it.

That reminder of Hamas members’ conspicuous consumption stood in stark contrast to the message of the news cycle that had been raging for days prior: the charge that Israel had been deliberately starving Gaza to the brink of its existence. Warnings of famine have been an ever-present fixture of the anti-Israel side of the narrative of this war, and those warnings have always proved false. What made a much larger swath of the public believe the sky was really falling this time? A viral, and baldly misleading, photograph.

On July 23, the U.K. tabloid Daily Express ran a cover photo of Mohammad al Motawaq, an 18-month-old Palestinian child in Gaza, looking gaunt in his mother’s arms. Young Mohammad instantly became the symbol of Israel’s supposed policy of starvation. The next day, news agencies around the world, including the New York Times, began using photos of Mohammad. He was, the New York Times reported, born healthy — and now he was wasting away. The photo went viral at a moment when concerns over food scarcity in Gaza were growing again, and the narrative quickly turned against Israel. Israeli leaders were caught off guard because they had recently accepted the terms of a ceasefire and expected Hamas to do the same. Instead, Hamas turned down the deal, and public outrage focused on Israel.

Even President Donald Trump seemed moved by the photos. “Based on television, I would say … those children look very hungry,” Trump said on July 28. He added, “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can’t fake that.”

During Trump’s first term in office, the images of the aftermath of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s chemical-weapons strike on civilians, including children, convinced the president to reverse his policy of nonintervention in that country’s civil war. Israel’s critics hoped the photos of young Mohammad would turn him against Israel. But Trump held steady. The next day, he posted on social media: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!”

Trump remained focused on improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza but was hesitant to break with Israel publicly. That caution proved wise, as the photos of young Mohammad turned out to be highly misleading. Mohammad was suffering from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, and his brother, who was cropped out of the photos, is healthy. Semafor obtained internal New York Times communications revealing that the paper had initially wanted to use a photo of a different child in place of Mohammad — but that child, too, had cerebral palsy. It suddenly appeared to be rather difficult to document the starvation that Israel’s critics claimed was happening with such certainty.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there is no suffering in Gaza. The question of whether there is hunger is different from the question of who is responsible for the misery. Trump has consistently, and correctly, held Hamas responsible for its willingness to sacrifice Palestinian civilians to provoke outrage toward Israel. As prominent Palestinian expat and activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote, Hamas really does want Palestinians in Gaza to starve: “Producing mass death from hunger is the group’s final play, its last hope for ending the war in a way that advances its goals.” That is because Hamas cannot win on the battlefield. Its only hope for holding on to power in Gaza is the intervention of the international community. If the world can restrain Israel through diplomatic pressure, Hamas can live to fight another day. Hence the full-court press with propagandistic photos that could elicit waves of outrage faster than they could be debunked.

But that doesn’t definitively answer the question of whether there is malnutrition in Gaza at all, nor does it explain why the narrative shifted so decisively in late July. To answer that, we must address a different question: How does Gaza get its food?

Until a few months ago, Gaza got its shipments of humanitarian aid delivered to Israeli border crossings, where the aid was inspected and then sent on into Gaza in convoys of U.N. trucks. The system had obvious flaws: For one, Hamas accompanied many of the trucks and guarded much of the warehoused supplies, giving the terrorist group open access to the food. Hamas also insisted on controlling the distribution of aid and shot to kill anyone collecting aid to distribute who wasn’t a member of Hamas. The terrorist group also siphoned a certain amount of aid right off the bat, before the truckloads could be delivered to the warehouses. And non-Hamas-guarded trucks were hijacked by Hamas militants or gunmen hired by Hamas.

According to Palestinians who worked at the crossings, Hamas would take inventory of everything that came into the strip to levy taxes on it. Another Gaza contractor said Hamas would charge local merchants protection dues and would confiscate their supplies if they didn’t pay up. Hamas would also, the Washington Post revealed, confiscate aid vouchers and distribute them to members. Finally, Hamas would resell food at a steep markup, making a profit and pricing many Palestinians out of the food that was supposed to be free. Halfway through the war, Hamas had reportedly pocketed $500 million from reselling the aid. The money enabled Hamas to keep recruiting and paying members, while the stolen food stores kept Hamas members well fed.

On top of all that, U.N. agencies were found to have been infiltrated by Hamas members. Some U.N. employees took part in the Oct. 7 attacks. Others held hostages in Gaza. At one point in the war, the Israel Defense Forces discovered an entire Hamas data center and server farm underneath a U.N. office, which was sharing its access to the electric grid with a room full of Hamas servers and whose placement served to shield the Hamas command center from the IDF.

In February, an alternative aid-distribution plan took shape. In March, Israel paused all aid to Gaza in preparation for the new system. Backed by the United States and Israel, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation launched in May, opening select distribution sites in the enclave. Its mission was simple: give the free humanitarian aid directly to Palestinians in Gaza instead of Hamas soldiers. The U.N. refused to participate in the new system, and most so-called “humanitarian” nongovernmental organizations also boycotted. Hamas responded by attacking GHF workers, spreading false rumors about where aid would be distributed to trick hungry Palestinians in Gaza into making futile treks in the heat, and creating as much chaos as it could outside the distribution sites.

Meanwhile, the U.N. let hundreds of trucks full of food and other supplies bake in the Gaza sun rather than distribute them under the new system. This combination of factors — the two-month aid pause, the U.N.’s refusal to work with GHF, and Hamas’s mischief — ensured that there would be less food available to Palestinians in Gaza than anyone had initially planned.

But just how much less? Here is where the “famine” claims run up against hard numbers. According to the World Food Programme, the people of Gaza require 62,000 tons of food per month. As writer and researcher Salo Aizenberg pointed out, in the two months prior to the March aid pause, enough aid entered Gaza to feed the enclave through August. All told, that brings the total amount of aid to enter the strip during the war to nearly 1.5 million tons, which would be enough to feed the people of Gaza for 23 months — longer than the war has lasted thus far. Amid global pressure, Israel has allowed more trucks, airdrops, and crossings to get aid into Gaza in recent days as well. And some U.N. aid trucks have been operating since May.

So where did the food go?

We already know that pre-GHF aid was diverted by Hamas. And the recent aid? Since May, according to the U.N.’s own data, over 87% of the aid was hijacked, looted, or diverted. Barely 10% made it to its destination. The rest was taken “peacefully by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors.”

THE FUTURE OF THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT

Members of Hamas aren’t the only “armed actors” in Gaza — there are clans challenging their power in certain areas — but they are the most prevalent. And it is highly unlikely that the majority of the hijacked aid was taken “peacefully” because that would require stopping a convoy of large trucks and swarming them. But either way, the U.N. simply couldn’t get the job done. U.N. aid, therefore, is likely to go only to those who have weapons and numbers and the strength to mob convoys. This is a recipe for the poor getting poorer and the hungry getting hungrier. And it highlights a seeming contradiction at the heart of trying to get aid into enemy territory: One can increase aid without solving malnutrition because ending malnutrition requires one to remove bad actors from the equation, which is the entire point of Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza.

In other words, the interests of the West and the interests of the “humanitarian” world are aligned. Admitting that, however, requires the acknowledgment that an Israeli military victory is a prerequisite for those interests to be fulfilled. Are Israel’s critics capable of facing up to this inconvenient truth? The future of Gaza depends on it.

Seth Mandel is senior editor of Commentary.