‘60,000 Dead from Starvation’: American Doctors Quietly Retract Grotesque Gaza Libel

Admitting they don’t ‘claim to have all the answers,’ physicians urge Biden and Harris to ‘withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel.’

By Rachel O’Donoghue, Honest Reporting

The Gaza death toll is “already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” and “everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both—including every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage.” These are just a couple of the wildly exaggerated and demonstrably false claims made in an open letter signed by 99 American physicians, surgeons, and nurses who purport to have volunteered since the Hamas massacre last year.

Curiously, the authors felt the need to add a caveat when discussing Israeli hostages—“probably sick.” Apparently, while they are absolutely certain that every one of Gaza’s two million residents is on death’s door, the hostages who have been starved, tortured, and held underground for a year? Well, probably.

If one needed a clue as to how flimsy the claims in this letter are, they need only revisit an earlier version of the same letter published in July by many of the same signees. In that original letter, these trustworthy medical professionals warned that more than 60,000 people had died of starvation in the Strip since October 7, 2023.

Claiming that Israel has a “deliberate policy” of starving Gaza that was supposedly “not in dispute,” the signees cited a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) as their evidence. Yet, the IPC had already revised its earlier warning, finding no evidence of famine in Gaza. Naturally, it’s the earlier warning—the one the IPC itself said was wrong—that the authors chose to cite.

But in the latest version, the 60,000 dead from starvation? Well, they’ve vanished. Instead, we now have vague claims of “widespread malnutrition.”

The sources these medical professionals use in both letters to conjure up their wild figures are easy to debunk. For example, they cite The Lancet as an authority, touting it as the “most prestigious medical and public health journal in the world.” They conveniently omit that the staggering figure of 186,000 deaths they reference didn’t come from peer-reviewed data or even a study—it was lifted from an opinion piece published in The Lancet’s “correspondence” section. Hardly the rigorous science you’d expect from such a distinguished source.

In addition to the liberal use of wildly inaccurate figures pulled from wholly dubious sources, the letter is sprinkled with a generous dose of modern-day blood libels, such as the vile lie that Israel is deliberately targeting women and children, describing the “unbearable cruelty” inflicted on them, with women “shredded by [American] bombs” and children “murdered.”

It’s the attached appendix, however, that truly reveals the absurdity of these missives. It’s a mishmash of outdated reports from groups like Save the Children and Human Rights Watch, littered with contradictory statistics and cherry-picked quotes from U.S. politicians.

In the latest letter, we’re told at least 118,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7—yet this is the exact same figure given in the previous letter months ago. And then they admitted it was “impossible to accurately estimate how many Palestinians in Gaza have died since October 7.”

Make it make sense.

And then there’s the irony: shortly after urging President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel…until good faith negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict,” the signees admit they don’t “claim to have all the answers” because, well, they’re “simply physicians and nurses.”

The sheer arrogance is breathtaking—demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while simultaneously insisting the conflict continues solely because of U.S. weapons support, and in the next breath confessing they have no idea how to resolve the conflict. But still, Biden and Harris must “end this madness now!”

One wonders how many of these signatories have lent their names to letters demanding an end to the “madness” of the endless rocket and terror attacks on Israeli civilians—attacks that both preceded October 7 and have continued ever since.

As sure as night follows day, gullible journalists will inevitably reference this inflated and erroneous death toll in future articles.