Australia/Israel Review

When it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, UN representatives should no longer be quoted on live news broadcasts – if at all. This will do more to reduce the spread of misinformation than anything Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and its parents company Meta, has been asked to do over the past decade.

On May 20, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, said this to a BBC anchor on-air: “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”

Just to put this in perspective, that number would equal more than half of the total number of civilian casualties during the entire course of the war so far. The BBC’s Anna Foster replied that 14,000 is “an extraordinary figure”. To which Fletcher replied that he would characterise it as a “chilling figure”. To anyone listening to the interview undistractedly, it would be immediately recognisable as “a made-up figure”. Foster’s even engaging with it was extraordinary. It was Fletcher’s willingness to spread a lie of that magnitude that was “chilling”.

How did Fletcher come to the 14,000 figure? “We have strong teams on the ground” was his answer.

With that, the number was off and running. On top of massive international media coverage, British lawmakers in the House of Commons even cited the number during parliamentary debate.

It turned out that the number of dead babies in the UN projection was actually zero. Zero babies. Fletcher had garbled a report that worried that 14,000 children could possibly suffer malnutrition over the course of an entire year if no food aid were allowed into Gaza for that period of time.

Again, number of deaths in the study: zero. Timeline for the study: one year.

Obviously, Tom Fletcher cannot ever be allowed near a news audience again. I would say that Fletcher should probably find another line of work, but whoever would succeed him atop the UN humanitarian pyramid would likely be just as unreliable and unethical.

And that’s the problem. It’s true that no one outside of Goebbels’ communications team has so propagandised a global audience during a war to exterminate the Jewish people. But the UN inflates figures all the time, and it collaborates with genocidal fascist death squads to do so. Fletcher is what happens when you irresponsibly allow the UN to be considered a voice of authority.

No UN personality should be quoted without the news agency concerned first checking into the statement. About anything.

And anyway, what are Fletcher’s trusted teams on the ground up to these days? Well, also on May 20, Israel facilitated the entry of 93 UN trucks of food, supplies and medicine into Gaza. How many, according to the UN itself, reached their destination?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s a number that has come up a couple of times already. That’s right – zero.

According to Haaretz, “the UN said that none of the trucks that entered Gaza reached their destination due to traffic, logistics and security problems.” 

Traffic. Traffic. The United Nations says it failed to deliver baby food to Gazan infants because of traffic. [To be clear, some of the aid began to actually reach Gazans the following day – ed.]

The UN – at least in terms of anything involving the Mideast – cannot be trusted to act and cannot be trusted to speak. It will not say what is true, and it will not even come close to accomplishing the tasks it demands for itself. So here again we have our favourite number: zero. There are zero things the UN can be trusted with in this conflict. Stop quoting them, stop delegating important tasks to them, and certainly stop repeating anything you hear from them without some sort of fact-checking effort first.

Listening to the UN will get people killed. How many? I cannot speculate, but the number is almost certainly greater than zero.

Seth Mandel is senior editor of Commentary magazine. © Commentary magazine (commentary.org), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.