Just when you thought Israel couldn’t be any more evil, yesterday we learned that thousands of babies are set to perish under its ruthless writ in Gaza. Fourteen thousand to be precise. All in the next 48 hours. Thousands of innocent lives snuffed out as the Jewish State, that most wicked of states, looks the other way. Now we know, the cry went up, just how barbarous the State of Israel can be.
Israelophobia is out of control. It is the most dangerous bigotry of our times
This story spread like a pox through the internet yesterday. It infected influencers everywhere. Everywhere you looked you’d see those cruel numbers – ‘14,000 babies’ and ‘48 hours’. ‘Nazi scum Israel’, the mob wailed. No one can deny it now, the virtuous cried: Israel slays babies for sport.
Politicians cited the coming grim death toll. Israel must let in humanitarian aid right now, they said, in order that those 14,000 souls might be saved. It’s all over the papers today. ‘This must end now’, says the front page of the Daily Mirror. If not, ‘thousands of babies’ will shortly die. It drove the point home with a tragic photo of an emaciated Gazan kid.
There is only one problem with this claim that 14,000 babies in Gaza are at risk of death by starvation in the next 48 hours: it isn’t true. At best, it’s a misunderstanding. Armies of activists and hacks falsely accusing the world’s only Jewish nation of overseeing the largest mass death of babies of our century so far? Tell me that isn’t the blood libel reborn, I dare you.
The story originated in comments made by a UN official on the Today programme. ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we reach them,’ listeners were told. The UN’s man was pressed – gently, one should note – about how he arrived at this figure. He said something about how the UN’s ‘strong teams on the ground’ are feeding back such chilling predictions.
It went viral. It ignited some of the worst Israelophobia – and outright anti-Semitism – I’ve seen since 7 October 2023. Social media’s cesspit of bigotry bubbled even more furiously than usual. ‘Evil’, cried leftists whose entire personality is hating Israel. ‘Satanic demons’, said hard-right cranks who hate the Jewish nation because they hate Jews.
And then the claim unravelled. Belatedly the BBC offered some clarification. The UN has now said, it reported, that it’s possible there will be 14,100 ‘severe cases of malnutrition’ among Gazan kids ‘aged six to 59 months’ over the next year if more aid does not get through. We need to get aid in ASAP, the UN said – ‘ideally within the next 48 hours’.
In short, there is no calamitous prospect of 14,000 babies starving in the next two days – thank God. Rather, the UN is concerned that there might be that number of acute cases of hunger among very young kids if nothing changes, aid wise, over the next year. This is a wholly different claim to the one that whipped up such a storm of frothing anti-Israel animus.
It’s good the BBC has offered clarification. Now we await the UN’s explanation for why one of its officials made such a thin and incendiary claim on live radio. The Spectator has contacted the UN to ask. Perhaps it was an honest mistake. But whatever their answer, I feel it’s too late. The damage is done.
Israel has once again been libelled across Christendom. And Hamas will be rubbing its hands in glee at the spread of the vile calumny online that says the Jewish State is blasé, if not actively keen, on the mass death of children. It is unforgivable to so gravely undermine Israel while giving a propaganda boost to the army of anti-Semites it is at war with. The UN has some serious explaining to do. Maybe BBC Verify can get on the case.
Those numbers – 14,000 and 48 hours – should live in infamy. For me they’re up there with the ‘45 minutes’ claim made in the dodgy dossier on Iraq. Both are figures that fanned the flames of war. One led to the destruction of Iraq, the other threatens to inject momentum into Hamas’s racist crusade against the Jewish State. Shame on those who have so completely suspended their critical faculties, and drunk so deeply from the cup of Israelophobia, that they accepted these numbers without question.
That’s the most unsettling thing in this affair: the voracious online appetite for horror stories about Israel. Every claim about Israel, regardless of its veracity, is lapped up by radical activists and digital mobs who have convinced themselves that this is the cruellest nation to ever exist. Israelophobia is out of control. It is the most dangerous bigotry of our times. It has now even breathed life backed into the medieval libel that said Jews long for the blood of innocents. The importance of confronting this sickness in our societies cannot be overstated.
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