Starving Gaza? Or starving the truth?: Tim Flack

Key topics:

• Mia Swart’s Gaza famine article criticised as biased propaganda, not reporting.

• Holocaust inversion used to recast Israel as oppressor, Hamas as victim.

• Hamas manipulates aid; reality shows both hardship and abundance in Gaza.

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By Tim Flack

Mia Swart’s Sunday Times article, “Starving Gaza is a war crime,” is presented as sober moral outrage. In reality, it is a carefully curated piece of political theatre that omits facts, distorts history, and parrots the talking points of Hamas-aligned NGOs. 

On October 7, 2023, as Hamas fighters massacred over a thousand Israelis, raped women, burned families alive, and kidnapped civilians, Swart took to social media to post “Oh what a beautiful morning…” That single line tells you everything about her moral compass. She did not post images of Israeli victims, nor condemn the butchery. Yet she now casts herself as a humanitarian voice of the oppressed. 

Holocaust Inversion: The Oldest, Ugliest Trick 

What Swart engages in is Holocaust inversion. This is the propaganda tactic of taking the most documented atrocity in history, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and flipping the moral ledger so that the descendants of the victims are recast as the new Nazis. 

In Swart’s narrative, Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto, Hamas is a plucky resistance, and Israel, a Jewish state still bearing the scars of the Holocaust, is the Reich. This is not a sloppy analogy. It is a deliberate weaponisation of Jewish historical trauma to delegitimise Jewish self-defence. It erases the agency of Hamas, absolves it of responsibility for civilian suffering, and trains all outrage on Israel. 

The Warsaw Ghetto was an unarmed civilian population deliberately starved to death by an occupying power bent on extermination. Gaza is a self-administered territory under the control of Hamas, an armed, extremely well-funded Islamist movement whose founding charter calls for the eradication not just of Israel but of all Jews everywhere. Israel does not seek to exterminate Gazans. It seeks to dismantle a terrorist army that hides behind civilians, seizes aid, and builds attack tunnels under homes, mosques, schools and hospitals. 

The NGOs Behind the Narrative 

Swart’s rhetoric tracks precisely with statements issued by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Al-Haq, and Al-Mezan. These groups have a long history of political lawfare against Israel and are embedded in the same ideological ecosystem as Hamas. They are too, involved in the ICJ case and its founders, all notable PFLP terrorists, might I add, are in all the ICJ photographs. 

On October 9, 2023, just two days after the Hamas massacre and long before any credible famine assessment could be conducted, Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights were already accusing Israel of “employing starvation as a weapon.” Al-Mezan issued a statement calling Israel’s actions “total warfare on Gaza’s civilian population.” These early proclamations were not humanitarian analyses. They were pre-packaged political weapons designed to frame the war’s narrative from the outset. One would almost think that Swart 

works directly with Shawan Jabarin of Al-Haq and Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, both of whom have documented terrorist backgrounds as convicted members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). 

These NGOs are not neutral observers. They lobby foreign governments, feed material into UN special rapporteurs, and pursue criminal complaints in the ICC, all with the aim of isolating Israel diplomatically. They also deliberately omit the role of Hamas in hoarding and diverting aid, taxing goods, and selling “humanitarian” supplies on the open market. 

The Gaza You Do Not See 

The famine narrative collapses under the weight of visual evidence. For months, the X account @Imshin (x.com/imshin) has published daily scenes from Gaza that never appear in Swart’s columns, painting a very different picture from her skeletal wasteland portrayal. 

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Take the streets and markets. There are children eating home-cooked shawarma wraps made from chicken supplied through aid deliveries. There are Gazan youths lining up at sweet shops to buy cakes and pastries. Ice cream parlours have reopened, music spilling out onto crowded sidewalks. Stores display shelves full of chocolates, sugary drinks, and imported biscuits. Restaurants serve calzones, pastries, cheese platters, and salads, with patrons paying via digital systems. Markets report falling prices for sugar, rice, cheese, and eggs because of oversupply. Families are seen unloading sacks of sugar and flour into their living rooms. Please do go and look for yourself, the same Gazans claiming starvation are boasting about the food they have. 

These images do not erase the fact that war has brought hardship and shortages to parts of the Strip. But they do challenge the one-dimensional famine narrative. What emerges instead is a more complex reality: pockets of abundance alongside real hardship, humanitarian deliveries alongside Hamas theft, and an active black market thriving in goods claimed to be unavailable. These things should have been thought about before raping for resistance, kidnapping for ransom or political leverage, slaughtering festival goers, torturing hostages, firing rockets from hospitals, and using schools as arms depots. 

War has undeniably brought shortages and suffering to parts of Gaza, but portraying the entire territory as a skeletal wasteland is a deliberate falsification and a calculated piece of propaganda. The reality includes pockets of abundance alongside hardship, humanitarian deliveries intercepted and exploited by Hamas, and a thriving black market in goods claimed to be unavailable. This is not a plea for sympathy; it is a factual counterpoint to the caricature presented by propagandists. 

Why This Matters 

By presenting only the famine imagery and Nazi comparisons, Swart is not engaging in honest reporting. But then again, she once worked for Al Jazeera, an outlet so biased that even the PLO expelled them from Judea and Samaria. Other Arab states, including Egypt, 

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Jordan, have also blocked or restricted them for political and security reasons. She is participating in a political project that has been running since day two of this war: erase October 7 from memory, erase Hamas from the equation, and depict Israel as a genocidal state starving children to death. 

Her piece never asks why aid fails to reach many civilians. It never mentions Hamas’s seizure of supplies. It ignores Egypt’s closure of its own Gaza border. It overlooks the fact that humanitarian convoys enter Gaza regularly, even in wartime, often under Israeli coordination. It also fails to ask why the UN, with hundreds of thousands of tons of aid stockpiled in the region, is not actively collecting and delivering it directly to civilians instead of leaving it to rot in the sun. From the very outset of the conflict to the present day, Israel has in reality taken all reasonable measures to allow a constant flow of humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter Gaza while at the same time consistently released detailed reports to the international community on what has been provided. Such evidence, it hardly needs be said, also features not at all in Swart’s analysis. Because what is happening here is not about the facts but about manipulating perceptions for a predetermined ideological goal. 

The Truth 

Gaza’s suffering is real. But it is not solely, or even primarily, of Israel’s making. The people of Gaza have been held hostage by Hamas for nearly two decades. Hamas has chosen war over peace, rockets over roads, and martyrdom over medicine. 

Articles like Swart’s erase that truth. They function as propaganda masquerading as moral outrage, rooted in Holocaust inversion, fed by compromised NGOs, and blind to on-the-ground evidence that contradicts their claims. 

Until the role of Hamas is acknowledged, and until the propaganda apparatus built by groups like Al-Haq and Mezan is recognised for what it is, “starvation” will remain less a humanitarian crisis than a political weapon. 

When the truth eventually cuts through the noise, the images, and the propaganda, there will be no middle ground left to hide on. People will be forced to reckon with what was really happening and who was responsible. Those who spent these years enabling lies and defending murderers will find history’s judgment swift and unforgiving. One had better hope they chose to stand on the right side before that day comes.