(JNS) When it comes to the Gaza Strip, public headlines too often flatten human tragedy into slogans: “genocide,” “famine,” “ethnic cleansing.” Recent articles circulating in the Israeli press and social media have gone so far as to argue—on the basis of spreadsheets and calorie charts—that Israel is guilty of deliberately starving Gazans into submission. Their starting point? A comparison between the number of trucks Israel allows in and some estimate of how many calories an average Gazan requires. Neat, simple and supposedly universally moral.

But hunger isn’t a spreadsheet, and it certainly isn’t a banner for political rallies. If the analysis stops at calories-in versus mouths-to-feed, it misses the messy, often ugly, reality on the ground: Hamas propaganda, food theft, internal corruption, logistical chaos, and the tragic use of both Gazan civilians and Israeli hostages as pawns in a cruel game.

One widely circulated claim takes official Israeli data on food convoys and compares it to a Ministry of Health nutritional baseline. The “finding” is that shipments fall short of international minimums; therefore, famine is evident,...

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