From Commentary: now that the fighting in Gaza seems to be over Seth Mandel calls out the antisemitic libels

Commentary is a Jewish magazine, and a conservative one, and if you want to dismiss this article because of that, go ahead, but you’d be obtuse to do so. The article below, which is short, puts paid to the libels that Israel not only committed genocide in Gaza (to me, making such a claim is a touchstone of antisemitism) but also deliberately starved the Gazan population. (I’ll will say, though, that Israel’s brief 11-day withholding of food from Gaza was a mistake.)

But these false accusations, combined with the “progressives'” ignoring of real genocide in Sudan. give us a real idea about the motivations of many during this conflict.  I’m not a big exponent of “whataboutery”, but the deaths in Sudan have now mounted to over 150,000, and there are ample atrocities, including the recent attack on a maternity hospital by antigovernment forces in which nearly 500 of patients were killed willy-nilly. Could a reason for “progressives'” ignoring this war be because most of the perpetrators (and victims) are Muslim, with no Jews being involved?”

At any rate, Commentary writer and editor Seth Mandel, whom I’ve found to be a reliable reporter, calls out the antisemites in a new article in Commentary. Click the headline below to read for free.

Mandel makes several points (my summary):

1.) The UN doesn’t want to war to end. That’s because the organization, which is pro-Palestine and also supports an organization, UNRWA, that’s rife with Hamas terrorists, can now be called to account because the cease-fire allows investigations of death tolls and UNRWA involvement that could be ignored when all the news came from Hamas.

2.) There was no Israeli genocide; that much is clear to anybody with neurons. Of course it may be true that were a few deaths of Gazan civilians who were killed by the IDF deliberately rather than being “byproduct” casualties of IDF soldiers attacking Hamas. But I’d like to ask the “pro-genocide progressives” this:  if Israel intended to wipe out all Gazans, why did it send IDF soldiers into the territory, risking their lives, rather than simply bombing Gaza flat? After all, more than 1,100 IDF soldiers have died in that effort: far more than the number of hostagers rescued.

3.) There is no credible evidence of a famine, a near-famine, or Israeli-caused mass starvation in Gaza.  While throughout the conflict, which may be at an end, we heard repeatedly that Gaza was in the grips of mass starvation, the deaths by starvation were very, very few, and most of them involved people with pre-existing conditions.

Now for some excerpts by Mandel:

No one’s having more trouble accepting the possibility of peace than the United Nations.

While Gazans are finishing school, opening cafes, and posting photos of their full chicken dinners, one UN agency is still banging the drum of “acute malnutrition”—this as the crossings are open and the aid is flowing. UN relief coordinator Tom Fletcher, the source of the “14,000 dead babies in 48 hours” lie—one of the more dangerous and consequential hoaxes of the war—is meeting with the Irish government, which has itself achieved a previously unimagined level of irrelevance. And the International Court of Justice, the UN’s pretend world court, is issuing new demands of Israel to give Hamas-adjacent UN activists more access in Gaza.

All of it is meaningless, of course, having long been overtaken by events. Palestinian social media is currently the UN’s worst nightmare: Gazans with big smiles and full bellies. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously said, war is over if you want it. It’s just that the UN doesn’t want it.

Thankfully, nobody cares what the UN wants. But it’s worth examining why the UN is so angry that the war has ceased and Palestinian lives are improving.

One reason is that the war’s end makes it possible to start compiling definitive statistics. And those statistics make it crystal clear that UN-affiliated agencies and their partner NGOs have conducted large-scale fraud, the blast radius of which has incinerated the credibility of much of Western academic and “humanitarian” institutions.

About the “starvation”.  First, a couple of tweets showing the exaggerated claims (the IPC is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification):

Even since famine was officially declared by IPC on Aug 22, 2025 (Gaza was still labeled “catastrophic” and “famine imminent” since the start of the war) we should have seen 9,500 deaths. “Intentional starvation” claims underpin the ICC & ICJ cases. It was always fake. END pic.twitter.com/hem4kVuRNg

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) October 10, 2025

This tweet is based on a JNS article, but on the UN’s own data (see article here):

As I wrote back in August, enough food aid entered Gaza to feed the entire Palestinian population for 1,312 days, based on the World Food Programme’s metrics.

Now, UNICEF’s own data further proves that the “famine” allegations are nonsense pic.twitter.com/sF1eTNYhCV

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) October 30, 2025

Of course I am not cold-hearted about these deaths: after all, each one is a child loved by its parents, and each death is heartbreaking. My point is simply to show that the claims of “mass starvation caused by Israel” were always exaggerated–to the point of almost being totally false. And unless you want Gazans to die to support your narrative, this is heartening. From Mandel:

Let’s start with food. Salo Aizenberg—who probably deserves some sort of medal for his painstaking work compiling the true statistical toll of the war—pointed out this week that the UN-backed IPC declared a Gaza famine in August, and that we can now check the numbers against the prediction and verify exactly what the IPC got wrong.

Between the famine declaration and the cease-fire, there should have been 10,143 famine deaths in Gaza. Using Hamas’s own numbers of such deaths—which are obviously not undercounted—the total famine deaths in that period was 192.

That means the IPC predicted about 10,000 famine deaths and was short by about 10,000. The IPC is now at Candace Owens’s level of credibility and statistical reliability.

There was no famine. That’s not an opinion, it’s an indisputable fact. Also indisputable is that there was no near-famine. It wasn’t a close call.

That, by the way, is good news. Although the anti-Israel activist world was hoping for mass starvation, those of us who aren’t monsters are very happy that there was no famine in Gaza. Pay attention to those who dispute this and those who show their disappointment.

Now that the dust is settling, we can see that the ratio of civilian deaths to combatants was about 1.5 to 1: a remarkably low value for urban warfare in which Hamas used human shields. It is in fact the lowest value known among similar situations, and a testimony to the IDF’s policy of trying to eliminate combatants but not civilians:

Then there is the main event: the accusation of “genocide.” While this has been debunked again and again and again throughout the war—to the extent that anyone accusing Israel of genocide has disqualified themselves from legitimate debate over matters of war and peace—now that there is a cease-fire, we can work with steady numbers.

Aizenberg noted in September that using Hamas’s own statistics, and subtracting natural deaths and fatalities caused by munitions fired by Gazan combatants, one gets a total of about 33,000 civilian casualties. The widely accepted number of combatant casualties is at about 25,000.

Every one of those 33,000 civilian casualties is a tragedy and a testament to the effectiveness and ruthlessness of Hamas’s human-shield strategy. That number also means that there are fewer than 1.5 civilian deaths for each combatant war death, an almost unheard-of level of care for civilians by the Israeli army.

Again, these are the numbers. A genocide didn’t happen—that we knew a long time ago. But it is now clear that there is no plausible case that Israel used excessive force against civilians or targeted noncombatants. The opposite is true: In pursuing Hamas, Israeli soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians. This is not an interpretation of some contextless video floating around social media; this is established fact.

The United Nations and other “humanitarian” and “human rights” groups needed this war to go on in perpetuity so they could forestall a public reckoning they richly deserve. Peace is bad for their business.

Below is Mandel’s conclusion. I have to say that I’ve lived 75 years and have come across antisemitism only once—in a personal incident in high school. Otherwise I was oblivious to it. But the war in Gaza, with its widely-believed lies and libels, has certainly alerted me to the reason “progressives” pay so much attention to the world’s only Jewish country:

Finally, the “genocide” and “deliberate starvation” accusations can now take their place alongside history’s other assorted grotesque expressions of anti-Judaism. Just as Jews should feel no obligation to refute the accusation that they are “the sons of apes and pigs,” they should similarly avoid the debasement of being forced to answer for the fabricated claims of “genocide,” the intention of which is merely to incite violence against Jews and to diminish the crimes of the Holocaust.

The good news is that (fingers crossed) most of the killing has stopped, and also that we can have peace on campus now that the Hamasniks have lost. But don’t be deceived into thinking that antisemitism is dead. Those who banged drums and chanted “From the River to the sea” have lost most of what they were protesting, but of course the animus against Israel and Jews remains.