(JNS) The UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) released a report on Aug. 22 claiming that a famine had gripped Gaza City as of the second half of July—a claim that was parroted by the media and political commentators ever since. Almost immediately, however, those who scrutinized the actual data noticed glaring errors—so much so that the IPC met on the following Wednesday morning to issue a clarification. One error, in particular, was blatantly obvious. The data for the malnutrition rate, one of the three criteria the IPC uses to declare a famine, was wrong.

To declare a famine, the malnutrition rate must exceed 30% normally, or 15% if aid organizations use the middle-upper arm circumference, rather than the weight-for-height measure, as they have been doing in Gaza since the start of the war in October 2023. In August, the IPC claimed that the malnutrition rate had skyrocketed from slightly more than 10% in the first half of July to more than 16% in the second half of July in Gaza City. The report provided a graph to prove this, and data tables were used to create the graph.

There were two major problems. First, the tables included less than half the data for July provided by aid organizations as publicly reported on Aug. 8. Second, the IPC miscalculated the average malnutrition rate for the first half of July based on the incomplete data in the tables. Based on this incomplete data, the malnutrition rate in the first half of Gaza would have been reported as 16.7%, in which case it would have dropped in the second half of the month—and not skyrocketed as the IPC claimed. The malnutrition analysis, at best, suggested that the IPC had done a very sloppy job.

To try to fix the mistakes, the IPC released an addendum on Aug. 30. And it is this addendum that indicates that the IPC was intentionally fabricating data to support its claims.

The IPC relies on data that the Nutrition Cluster assembles from the many aid organizations conducting malnutrition screenings on the ground in Gaza. In July, seven aid organizations had screened for malnutrition in Gaza City. The Aug. 8 report published the datasets from each of these organizations with the name of the organization, the location and the dates when they conducted the screenings, the number of children screened and the malnutrition rates. The IPC also included this information in its initial Aug. 22 report.

The addendum, however, completely ignored the dates of the screenings, fabricating new dates as it divided the data from all seven datasets into two groups representing the first and second halves of July. In doing so, it misassigned the data from two aid organizations—Juzoor and MDM-France—to the first half of July. In fiddling with these dates, the IPC was able to get close to the 10% and over 16% that it initially showed in its Aug. 22 graph. However, when these dates are corrected for, the malnutrition rates for both the first and second half of July are 12.3% and 13.2%, respectively, both below the malnutrition threshold.

In addition, the IPC messed up its math again. The malnutrition rates that the addendum lists for each half-month do not combine to equal the malnutrition rate reported by the Nutrition Cluster for the whole month. This makes it look like the IPC tried to reverse engineer the data presented on Aug. 22, but made a mess of it.

Getting the rate above 15% was critical for the IPC because it had already ditched another of the three criteria it uses to declare famine: death rate due to wasting. Since the death rate in Gaza is nowhere near this threshold, which is needed to declare a famine, and since the IPC was concerned that this may slow aid, the IPC lowered its standards for the Aug. 22. It declared that there was reasonable rather than solid evidence for a famine since two of the three requirements—the threshold for malnutrition rates and food insecurity—were met.

However, without pushing the malnutrition rate above 15%, the IPC had no grounds for declaring a famine in Gaza.

When I contacted the authors of this report and the United Nations, they initially responded promptly to my queries and kindly sent me links to the addendum. However, when confronted with the errors in the addendum, they remained silent.

This is extremely unfortunate because monitoring malnutrition carefully is critical in Gaza. Even before the war, the malnutrition rate in Gaza was 4%, and aid organizations have remarkably been able to hold that rate at about 5% for most of the war. But they need good data to help the most vulnerable. Instead, by grossly misrepresenting the data, the IPC has injured its own credibility and compromised its ability to perform its crucial mission.

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