The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Was there a famine in Gaza? The top expert answers ┃Alex de Waal

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Did Israel starve Gaza, and why don't many Israelis believe the experts who say it did? Noam sits down with Alex de Waal, the world's leading famine scholar (World Peace Foundation, Tufts), for a tough but good-faith debate. De Waal argues that Israel could have ended the hunger "within a matter of days" and didn't. Noam lays out why people like him stay skeptical. Did his March 2024 warning that "tens of thousands" could die not come true? Why did a claim of 62,413 starvation deaths circulated with little pushback. They get into Mike Spagat's mortality survey and the missing child deaths, the 2025 blockade and the IPC famine call, flour prices, Hamas and aid, and whether it's still famine if people aren't dying. Both of them give ground along the way. Periel closes on the hostages, and de Waal ends with a plea about Sudan. 0:00 "Very well nourished": why Israelis doubt the famine experts 11:48 "The mud sticks": de Waal's own confession 25:03 "Tens of thousands": the warnings vs. Spagat's count 40:11 Feroze Sidhwa's 62,413 and "all errors are equal" 47:34 The 2025 blockade and the famine declaration 59:27 Flour prices, Hamas hoarding and Israel's "calibration" 1:06:50 Is it famine if people aren't dying? 1:18:31 The hostages, and Sudan

So we're not going to play our usual music because the music is very jaunty. And it's not good for today. So go ahead, Peril. Just, yeah. Okay. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world famous comedy seller. I am here with Noam Dorman, the host of the show and the owner of the comedy seller. I'm Periel Ashenbrand, the producer of the show.

And our guest today is Professor Alex DeWall. Am I pronouncing that correctly? That's fine. Yes. Okay. He is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He has worked on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s and has written a dozen books. Amongst them, his most recent one co-authored, is the Sudan's Africa's search for peace, democracy, and two viable states. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. It's good to be with you. Hello, sir. I appreciate you coming. You know, for some of them very nervous about this one, you were, I've known about you for, I don't know, how long has been since we first met Faro's? A couple of years. Yeah, and he's been urging me for a long time to have you on. I want to accomplish a couple things in this interview. First of all, I want to give the

viewers, you know, the best information that they can. My viewers are mostly pro-Israel people. I've at times found it hard to convince them of certain things that were true or they should be true. So that's, you're the world's expert, so they will hear it, a tested version of your arguments. And number two, I want to impart to you, hopefully, some insight into why people like me may be so, as you may view it, thick-headed or just resistant to what to you seems as plain as day. And I want to try to give you some insight into how someone like I think, and I think I represent a lot of people. So I'm probably going to talk more than I should. But this is very important to me, and I really appreciate it.

And, you know, I'm going to challenge you on some things. You know, there's that scene in Godfather, too. I'm going to speak to you, like, no senator of senator, like, you're not accustomed to being spoken to. But, you know, we're all grown-ups here. I hope that nothing I will challenge you with is beyond the same sort of thing that you would challenge somebody with, if the show were on your other foot. And you were having a serious debate about it. So let me. So let me.

So I have plenty of challenges. over the years from all sorts of quarters. And if we were, I'm at home now, but if you were, if we were in my office, I have on my wall one of my proudest things, which is an arrest warrant issued by the United Nations, believe it or not, in Mogadishu in 1993, when I was documenting some of the violations committed by UN forces and their response to my complaint was that I should be arrested for supporting the propaganda efforts of the United Somali Congress, which was the militia of the late general ID, whom I was also accusing of war crimes. That's another story.

All right, I'm nothing compared to that. All right. So I'm going to start. So this actually starts, my whole case here, and then, of course, it's going to lead to your case, predates October 7th. But I will use... something that you said, which I saw, which I'm like, oh, this is a perfect example. So, Stephen, can you play the pre-war Gaza thing? Yeah. Video. So I'm going to start with just a little excerpt of something that you said.

I could quote it, but I like the videos because it mixes it up. It's more interesting to the viewer to see videos. And it has been, it unfolded very rapidly at the beginning of the war between October 2023 over the first six months, in which you had a population that was very well-nourished, actually had very good health services, plenty of good food, low rates of malnutrition, that then very, very rapidly descended into a level of humanitarian emergency. Okay, so you can take that down, see. So I'll toss it to you first.

Do you know what I'm going to say about this? I wonder if you can read my mind already, having just met me. I'm wondering if you're going to talk about the very recent evidence that came out for relatively good nutrition in my children in Gaza. Is that right? No, no. So let me tell it is. So you say there that the people of Gaza were very well nutrition, plenty of food, plenty

of health services. Now, did any pro-Israel person hear any such thing about Gaza prior to October 7th? I remember two weeks into this, Norman Finkelstein was on my show, telling me, it's an open-air concentration camp. Food insecurity is compares to the worst in the world. Now, here is fun, Gaza. 50% of the population is unemployed. 60% of the children of the young people. 60% of the young people are unemployed.

Half the population in Gaza is class. by international humanitarian organizations as suffering from, quote, extreme food insecurity. That's Gaza. Now, people like to talk about Hamas. You know, I've looked up that fact, and there's a very high, almost similar, I think, stat that they give about America in terms of food insecurity. So it's not the same thing as starvation. It's some sort of poverty measure.

There are different gradations. I refer to extreme food insecurity, and that applies to about half the population of Gaza. I interrupted only because there's another one of these adjectives like density, which it evokes something, but we don't really know what that means. And, you know, I just try to really picture, are they hungry? Are they not hungry? But, you know, they're not quite sure where the next dollar is coming from. these kind of things. The essence of truth I'm trying to get to you. All we ever heard,

and I didn't have the knowledge to think it wasn't true, from, you know, Blumenthal to Aaron Mottie to Finkelstein to all sorts of documentaries was that the people in Gaza were in terrible situation when it came to food and nutrition

and stuff like this. And lo and behold, you're the world's expert and you let slip, or not slip, forgive me, but you let, you know, it was, you know, it was, wasn't your point. You were using it to set something else up. Actually, they were swimming in food and health services. So already, it's like someone like me says, already, well, I couldn't even

believe that. Now, now you're aware of the things I'm referring to. So what went wrong there? Why, why was it such common knowledge yet wrong? But the people in Gaza were very short on food prior to October 7th. So they were short on food in two senses, actually. One was that the diet wasn't terribly well balanced. There wasn't enough protein. So what I should have done more. But that's not what you said.

You said they had excellent nutrition. The measure of nutrition, the measure of acute food insecurity is a measure of protein, energy malnutrition among children. And there was plenty, and there was enough calories. Those children had plenty of calories. There was some micronutrient deficiencies. So I would qualify that slightly. That's tweaking it.

We have that in our cities in New York. I mean, are you going to tell me that what you just said and what Finkelstein and those people say in terms of description of Gaza's nutritional is the same thing? No. No, I'm not going to say that. What I'm going to say is up to October the 7th, I would qualify the good nutrition with two elements.

One is that there was some micronutrient efficiencies, which also you find in food deserts in the United States, etc. But the more important point is that the food situation was precarious in that it depended upon Israel allowing in food or not. And it was allowing in. Israel, and Israel only? What about Egypt? Well, the great majority of food came through Egypt.

And Israel had, you know, some pretty tight controls over that Egyptian border, too. There was smuggling. There was smuggling in tunnels under the barbed wire fences and so on. There was so much smuggling. They were even taxing the smuggling, right? That's what I read about. And finally, Mubarak or Cece, flooded the tunnel and closed up.

I don't know why they hate the Muslim Brotherhood, I guess. But listen, I'm not, neither here nor there to me to defend Israel on this particular subject. I just always puzzled when this is described as a single border territory as opposed to. And now Israel is their enemy that they're sworn to destroy. So we can kind of contemplate overreactions on Israel's part. especially seeing what happened on October 7th, maybe Israel was, you know, had some reason to be wary. But on the other side is their Arab brothers, and they can bring it as much food as they want, and Israel can't do a damn thing about it.

So it just, but anyway, continue. It doesn't change the underlying reality of their food they had. So, I mean, Israel had had tight control over actually all the, all the crossings. that the smuggling was from the Egyptian side, and it was variable, intermittent, Alsacea, as you said, was interrupting it. The key point is that in comparison to any other crisis that I studied, and I've studied many of them, the speed of deterioration from a, you know, a standing start from a situation in which there wasn't widespread acute child malnutrition was something without

without precedent that's that is the key point that I was that I was making and I think that some of the the analysts of Gaza wanted to have a an analysis of of the conditions before October 7th that was had no nuance in terms of what the deprivation was. There was much deprivation. There was much unemployment. There was much poverty, et cetera, et cetera. But there wasn't a lack of calories. That was the key point. So will you grant me that a, you know, a follower of the pro-Palestinian, and then we'll move on, of the pro-Palestinian point of view, the mainstream one, not like the extreme one, would have been surprised to hear someone say what you said about Gaza having good nutrition,

great health care. I've seen the other stuff you said comparable to many first world countries, better than the rest of the Arab world. This was not the general impression that we had. And from that, you know, incorrect impression, that became, you know, the load bearer of many other arguments about, so that's just, you know, okay. So then now now this is the only thing. I was going to say that I'm afraid I'm going to get under your skin about in terms of challenging

you, but I have to say it because it's necessary to say. So come the October 7th, and we'll get to the whole thing, you began to make a lot of dire predictions. But I just want to ask you about something that you wrote, which, by the way, far be it from me to criticize anybody who writes mea culpa and things like that. So, you know, but it's still necessary. You wrote an article essentially confessing to overstating certain human rights catastrophes in order to get headlines. For instance, about Rwanda, we didn't have anything resembling complete evidence.

Ours was a rough sketch, but it served its purpose. And on Sudan? My first report in 1991 used the term ethnic cleansing because it would grab headlines, and it worked. Howells and furals of denial from the accused are considered an honor. The louder, the better is by human rights organization. The standard of proof is well below what is needed in court for indictment even, but the mud sticks. So, you know, how does someone who read that article contextualize your, your claims after October 7th and say, no, no, this time, it's a new to wall.

He's not, he's not just flinging mud, and he's not, he's not understanding that he can get headlines this way, but this is really a real standard of proof, indictment level at least, right? So one, I mean, one of the things that I, that I do, and I've done repeatedly in my work, is self-critique. And the point is to try and learn from where I was at a certain point in my career before what I was doing. So the two cases you're referring to are the genocide inflicted by the Islamist government, the militant jihadi government in Sudan against the Nubah people of Sudan in the mid-1990s, which was one that was entirely hidden from the world. and for some years, in fact, there was really just one or two of us who were voicing,

this is what was going on. And we went beyond the evidence that we had, but actually what we said turned out to be true, and I actually got there, which was an exercise in breaking a siege, flying illegally from Kenya, avoiding the Sudanese government's in order to actually land and investigate on the ground. The allegations that we'd been making were, which were going beyond the evidence that we had that turned out to be true. And in the case of Rwanda, yes, in 1994, I was working at those times for human rights organisations.

I said, okay, let's go beyond what we know, let me go with the gut of what we know about what we know about, of what we know about what the Rwandese genocideh were doing. And it turned out to be correct. But the reason I wrote that was in order precisely to be able going forward when I moved from being purely a human rights advocate, working in the NGO sector, to being an academic, taking a position which required a level of scrutiny of the evidence that went beyond what the regular human rights NGO would do.

And so I forget exactly what year I published. That must have been six or seven years ago. And when I was confronted with Gaza, at first I didn't write. I was not one of those who rushed to write in the first few weeks, partly actually because my own experience of the Hamas militants who'd been in Khartoum and had a centre there was so dreadful I mean people I knew had come out of their

torture centres you know unable to walk etc and and I thought you know I my instinct was so contrary to Hamas I thought you know this is this is this is a terrible and brutal organization and I had no doubt that they were you know inflicting cruelties in the full knowledge of what Israel would do in response so I actually wrote nothing for for the first few months until I began to see the the most reputable the most impartial the most cautious of of those who are assessing the food security situation coming out and with the with evidence that that that really stood up to

scrutiny and really compared with with the materials that I had elsewhere I I I mean I've been very careful there's been a lot there's been a lot of NGO commentary on on on on on Gaza and I don't you know I don't cite those I'm very careful in citing you know the the the The data that comes out of the World Food Program, the what's called the IPC, the integrated food security phase classification system, which is ultra-conservative,

the US FUSNET and so on. So I fully accept your answer as to your own explanation for, you know, why you change your standards in terms of what you would allow yourself to say. But you are also,

I think, indicting the human rights organizations en masse, because as you describe it, what you are no longer doing is what you are saying they do, and that they are aware that they can grab headlines, unless you were an outlier to these people, I don't think that's what you're going to say. So this is just, you know, I'm building this opposite, the simultaneous case. It's like, why do people like me take everything with such a grain of salt? So I read that and I say, okay, well, you know, maybe I can't take DeWal with a grain of salt. But certainly if what he's saying is true, where he came from, he's blowing their cover, right?

And I don't want to, I don't want to make my decisions based on something that doesn't even pass probable cause, standard of proof, as you put it, or a level of indictment. I want to base it on, you know, 80%, you know, real certainty. Good faith certainty. Doesn't mean not the criminal standard, but good faith certainty. So, am I wrong about that? Well, actually, there's one point that's, I think, very key on this, or two. I mean, one is that human rights organizations have, I think, improved their standards, partly because one of the things that happened from the 1990s onwards was you began to get

these international tribunals. So they lobbied for the tribunals for Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, etc. And as they did that and as the professional investigators for and prosecutors for these courts came into play, which wasn't the case when I was writing in 1991, 92, 93, 94, these courts just didn't exist. When the courts came into the picture, compelled the human rights organizations to to raise their game because they didn't want to be in the situation of being called to give evidence in front of let's say the the the iCC on a case and you know d'ar fore or kongo whatever and the court saying you know this is hearsay this is unreliable another point i would make though is that i i did work for for human rights watch

and i remember that when israel came up with human rights watch there was a lot of debate among the Human Rights Watch Board about whether Israel should be held to the same standards as say Syria or Egypt. And the argument was, yes, we should hold them to the same standards. And Ken Roth, who until a few years ago was the... We usually play the Darth Vader music when you say Ken Roth, but I'll let you continue. Go ahead. He insists, you know, and he is someone with the strongest credentials that, you know, that Israel should be held to the same standards. Precisely because whenever an accusation is made against Israel, there's going to be pushback, there's going to be a challenge.

In a way that, you know, you could challenge, you could get away with challenging Omar al-Bashir or Bashar al-Assad, you know, and there wouldn't be a community of lawyers. and journalists and, you know, people like you in the United States who would say, hold on a moment, you know. So, you know, if I was accused by, you know, Omar al-Bashir, a former president of Sudan, of having a hatred of Sudan and being, you know, died in the wall opponent of Islam, you know, I would say, okay, that's, you know,

that just is something that gives me credibility. Because no one is going to stand up for him. Whereas it's not the case, you know, if you take on Israel. And actually we see that in the food security data. So one of the criticisms that's being made, and maybe I'm getting ahead of what you're going to say, one of the criticisms that is made of the UN for its determinations of famine,

etc., is that it's not bringing the same standards to bear on Israel's conduct on the food crisis in Gaza as it would in Somalia or South Sudan or whatever. And actually, it's the first, you know, for the first time in its history, this UN food security system, this IPC, has been challenged. It was challenged by South Sudan. It was challenged by northern Sudan, etc but no one took those challenges very seriously they were forced to take the Israeli challenges seriously and actually what happened when when that when Israel did challenge them to say you're getting it wrong you're exaggerating or whatever you know they went back and they scrutinized their data and you

to a degree that they never have to do in say South Sudan and and and what I don't want to get so the critics are really splitting hairs yeah I don't want to get too bogged down on on it. Only because I don't know how much time you have. I find this fascinating. Don't get me wrong. If we were having coffee, I would just be enraptured. I'm very interested in all this. But I want to try to keep ourselves to more bullet-pointish backs and forth. But all of which is to say that I appreciate that they've gotten better. And yet, you're not going to find any recent human rights amnesty or HRW saying that Gaza had excellent nutrition and health services

and plenty of cowl, you know, so they're, whatever. That's, that's my, I'm just saying why I'm skeptical of them. I don't rule out everything. So, so let's get to Gaza. So, so I would like to, I think it makes analytical sense, not, not, you don't have to agree, to, to divide the, the war into, essentially from the start until whenever it was, the end of February of 25, and then take up spring of 25 through to the end when Israel closed all the crossings, which I, I don't, I'm not in full agreement with you at that point either, but I'm in much, I am a critic. I'm an outspoken critic of what went on there at that time. But in so you were as of in early 2024, October 7th for people, it was October 7th,

was October 7th, 23. So this is March of 2024. You warned about the most intense famine since the Second World War. Thousands or tens of thousands threshold describes in terms of 100 daily, mostly children. You said that children, where is it? I have it here. You said basically we passed the point of no return that thousands, if not tens of thousands,

were going to die. I'm sorry that I don't have the... Yeah, I can go back to that. I can tell you exactly what type. Oh, here, this is last. It's too late to avert a humanitarian disaster that is going to kill thousands. if not tens of thousands of people, that is the bottom line. That was March of

2024. Now, that didn't happen, correct? So, I want to make two points here. Sure. One is the difference, which is a technical difference, but a very important one, between intensity and magnitude. This is not the biggest famine by any means. Because the population is smaller, you've said. Because the population, yeah, the population is small and the length of time is is not, is, was short. It didn't, it was not prolonged in, let's say,

the way the Sudanese famine has been prolonged over many years. So the, the prediction was, was in March of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, for when the, the, the, the, the US government fused net had actually said there was famine. And the, the, the UN IPC has said, we're on the brink of famine. And I said, it's, yes, it, that if this. trajectory continues, it will be too late to prevent thousands, if not tens of thousands. Now, the first point to make... Listen, I just want to say, listen, people speak in interviews and they don't speak carefully,

and people can have quotes that don't actually reflect what they meant to say. But I just want to say, in the new humanitarian, this is actually an article. He said, he didn't say it's a trajectory. He said, it is too late to avert humanitarian disaster that's going to kill thousands, if not tens of thousands. people. Okay. So we, so yeah, and I said humanitarian catastrophe. I did not actually at that point say famine, which is a key distinction here. But kill tens of thousands, yeah. But I said thousands. Now, we actually don't know how many have died. There has not been a survey that has indicated how many have died. And the famine mortality is not just individuals dying of starvation. It is all the causes of

mortality above a normal threshold that is caused by combination of hunger, disease, lack of water, and poor sanitation, exposure, etc. We don't know how many. But I think we know it wasn't a famine. I mean, not only because the FRC, you call it, found no famine, but because of that spaget, the spaget assessment of the excess deaths show no famine, right? The Spagget estimate of the excess deaths, I was actually looking at it, I forget what the figure was, but they estimated, I think, 13,000 excess deaths, not from non-trauma causes. So let's take them one at a time. Tell the people about this FRC judgment, and then let's get to Spaget, because I want to challenge you strongly on Spaget. Go ahead.

Okay, okay. So let me, so I will come back to Spaget. And I, forgive me if I don't have the survey in front of me right now. I can send it to you. I can email it. No, no, I have it. In fact, I can even look it up. I was looking at his numbers just yesterday.

Okay. So what happened there was very interesting, because one of the things, if you read what I have also been writing, is I say there's a distinction, a key distinction between what happened in Gaza and let's say what happened in Sudan, is that it can be turned around. virtually overnight. And what happened in March of 2024 is that under pressure from the Biden administration, the Netanyahu government turned it around. They opened the taps, they allowed the aid in. And that explains something very interesting here, which is that in the beginning of March, or I figured it was the middle of March of 2024, the UN's, our efforts,

FRC said we see famine on the horizon, imminent famine. And the US FUSNET then came out with a report saying it's happened. Then the UN came back and said, in the end of, I'm getting the dates mixed, the end of May, said actually the situation has improved. It's no longer that. And they said the FUSNet call on famine is not plausible. And that's because of the situation,

because in response to the predictions of famine, Israel had been forced to respond by the Biden administration. So it turned the situation around. Now, in terms of it being too late, now the article that I wrote was based upon the evidence as existed at that time, which was credible. And interestingly, although the Israel went out out of its way to attack the UN for saying there may be famine. It never said a word against the US for saying there was famine. Okay, but we have retrospective data now. We don't have to judge it. So then what happened is I think Mike Spaggett's survey data, which is the only survey data that we found.

But the FRC in whatever month, late in the year, actually they came and said they determined there was no famine. They said there was, yeah, according to their metrics. There was no. And this was a group when you would vouch for them as being independent and with integrity. So. So. But now, can I tell you why I think the spaggot thing shows unequivocally there's no famine? And you tell me where I'm wrong.

Of course, I'm probably, I'm probably going to make an ass of myself because, you know, like anybody who's delving into a discipline. and that he knows nothing about. But I'll tell you, but it was something that I heard you say, which I had like a eureka moment. I'll play it for you. This is with my pen pal, Glenn Greenwald. Go ahead. And for children, it's much more rapid.

Young children will starve much more quickly, and they will also succumb to infections. And one of the things that I think isn't widely understood, is that in most of these situations of famine, only a small proportion of those who perish, actually diagnosed as dying of hunger itself, of malnutrition. The majority of children, what happens is as they lose weight, they become more susceptible to infections, particularly diarrheal diseases.

And it's these and the dehydration that goes with that combination of malnutrition and infection that causes most of the deaths. And so the great majority of those who die, who are children under five, the most of the Most of those children are actually not diagnosed as dying of hunger itself. Okay, so you can put up table two now, see them. So what got me there, actually take it down until I'm finished. Just having it already. Got me there is that, and you've said there's other places,

that because children are so fragile, they make up the great majority of deaths when famine comes. And then I looked at Spaget's numbers, now, Spaggett, and you correct me if I'm wrong, he's from memory now. He said there was 8,000 excess deaths, meaning these are deaths not caused by war, and, of course, people always die, so above the amount of deaths that you would expect. And they model this by, like, essentially by polling a certain number of houses, and then, and of course there's a margin of error.

So he gives a number of 8,000, but the range, if you accept the margin of errors between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths. So he has a table there, table two, where he shows what he modeled it from. Put it up, Stephen. And what we see there is that in the nonviolent deaths, we have only four out of 59 deaths are children. So, and you can add one if you want to go up to 1217 to make it five. Now, that can't, by at least by what you've said, that can't be famine because it's totally

upside down. What that indicates is like a health care system that's crashed or whatever it is that kills older people. But if it was a famine, you would have to see, you know, half of them, children. But what you're seeing there is a very tiny. infant mortality is caused by something, but if the people who die in famine have to be overwhelmingly children because they're the first to go, then I don't see how you can model a famine out of what Spaggot has written there. So, where am I wrong?

So there are two points to make here. I mean, and by the way, one of, Okay, no, forget that point. You can take it down, so. So the first point to make is, no, sorry, now I'm losing my train of thought. So the key point is that the, what that episode actually demonstrated was that the, Israel had the capacity to actually stop this famine in its tracks in a way that was without parallel to other situations where food security has been deteriorating in this manner. And this was a point.

After that experience, then as a year later when the situation then unfolded again, gain in the same way. What I, the key point that I can then made, and you can see in my New York Times article of 1st of August last year, I said, Israel has the capacity to stop this and it has been, as it has demonstrated before. So that was the key. I completely agree with you. Yeah. Okay. Now, getting back to your, getting back to your point. So the other point is, is that To start off, we actually don't have a full picture because the spaggot survey did not cover everybody and working with him and others in order to have a more comprehensive survey. It would have to be way, way off to get from his numbers to something which resembles a famine. No, because the very worst hit areas were not surveyed. That was the key point.

But I'm conceding the point, two points here. One is that the situation was turned around more quickly than I anticipated at the time, which had not happened. That was a reversal that did not have a precedent in any of the famines that I've studied. But also the demographic pattern of this was something that was puzzling. And that has actually led several of us to look into other variants of famine mortality in different types of urban famine. So we've gone back, for example, to the Dutch famine of 1945 or to the mortality in the Syrian sieges. And here we actually find something that was sort of unexpected from the study of the demographic profiles of famine, which is one that affects much more adults than children, where you actually have a much higher number,

proportion of those perishing from the direct impact of malnutrition than you do from from disdemeanor. disease. Now this is something that was sort of largely unrecognized in the literature. Let me just turn to my simultaneous point a second. So can you understand how somebody like me, but less sophisticated than me, and less open-minded and less rigorous in their thought? After seeing this initial, the most intense in the mind, and we've all seen, you know, it brings to mind, newsreel footage of intense famine, you know, we've seen it. And you say, well, this is the most intense. So whatever happening in Israel is worse than what you've ever seen, more intense than that.

And then the FRC comes out with this thing, and then Spaggett comes out with this thing. It's like, okay, now we're going to, I don't want to get to quite yet, but we're going to get to, now, now, it's a new year. Now, this time we mean it. And the Israelis say, really? You told me, guys, it was starving.

You told me this. You told me this. You told me with the famine. And no, shit. Now this time, Israel really did play loose, I think, crossed the line. I don't know if it was famine. I don't think it was famine. But crossed the line with perhaps war crimes. And whether they intended it or not, whatever I've heard, I've heard, you know, legitimate

arguments on both sides. but I totally understand the mind of an Israeli who says, I can't hear any more things like this and react to them every time like I'm supposed to believe they're real because everybody's against us. Okay, so let me bring up one of the things. So at the same time, October 2024, our friend, and I do like him, Faro Sidwa, wrote in a letter,

in total, this is October 2024, in total, it's likely that 62,000. and 413 people have died of starvation and his complications in Gaza from October 7th through September 30th. So Faroz, now this guy is published in New York Times. He's writing letter to Biden. You're citing this very letter in your articles,

and he writes, you didn't cite the statistic 62,000, but you cited... I didn't cite those statistics, and there's a very good reason for that. Okay, I want to hear your reason. I'm assuming because you think the statistic is nonsense. but you also didn't correct him. You also didn't say,

I don't trust this guy anymore because he's giving 10x numbers or something he knows nothing about. So like, if you're an advocate for a cause, you wait for them to correct your arguments. But if you're an academic, if you're a scholar, it should be immaterial to you

which side the errors, well, which side the errors come from. Because to a scholar, to a scholar, all errors are equal. And you let this guy's Faroze get out there on my show every I say, 62,000 people

have died when you know it wasn't true. Now here I have to correct you. Now here you are not. Because if you read my blog post from December of that year how many people have died in Garland? You will see. I put numbers that was before

Spaggatz. And I published that saying that I did not consider that. that number credible, okay? Yeah, but what do you think about a guy who writes the number is what I'm saying? You did an article, the World Peace Foundation, and you cite his letter twice for,

I don't know, how many people, and that was your article, how many people died of starvation in Gaza, yeah. And I give the numbers, and I assess their credibility, and the low numbers, which are near zero, you know, 10, 50,

I said, these are nonsense. The high numbers, which are some scenarios, of which were published that gave numbers and up to 100,000, I said these are nonsense. And the number, the method and the number that Faro's gave, I say this is not, I forget the word I use, but I said not a credible method, okay? Right. But I'm asking a deeper question.

If it was a pro-Israeli scholar or an anti-famomist scholar and he was making wildly inaccurate claims about one thing, wouldn't you? you say to somebody like me, listen, why you, obviously you know that guy's methods are not to be trusted. Why are you trusting him on anything? That's my point. Because I know specific, because And by the way, and they claim to have been there and seen it. No, no, the method he was using, okay, was he was using an inference from, he was totally transparent about the method. It was not based upon his observation. It was based upon a data set. that was developed by the IPC that we have been,

that I would consider credible, but the IPC is very clear that if you put certain categories of people in certain numbers of people in certain categories of food, crisis or emergency, you cannot from that, those numbers, you cannot infer mortality. And that's what he did. And so he was not basing that number on his own experience.

He was basing it on an incorrect inference from a data set. So the two are very, very different. I had it out with him, and then we'll get on to the, where you're going to be on stronger ground. I had it out with him. And in my dopey common sense way, my argument to him was, well, first of all, you were just there for X number of months. If there's mass starvation going on, I think you would have seen it.

Number one, number two, half, at least half the population of Gaza has cell phones. How is it that 62,000 corpses are around and we're not, this is all very decent common sense stuff. Like at some points, like, you know, something's not right with this picture. You were there. We're not seeing it in the news. We're not seeing, like nobody's reporting it. You've inferred something. And, you know, it wasn't true.

and then you get to Spaggett's number, and, you know, he's modeling a tiny number of things. It's all a bit much. Look, I said to somebody recently, I said, I just want to know what's true. My support of Israel does not, as their right, as its right to exist as a nation, can even accommodate that right to exist,

having done terrible things. Like, I, my big cause is to remove the asterisk from Israel because no other nation anybody talks about pulling their card if they've done something horrible. And I don't think Jews are incapable of doing horrible things. I think that all you have to do is being American and live through 9-11. When we actually, you know, after 9-11, we were never really attacked or threatened again, and yet we were ready to just, you know, turn the entire Middle East door parking lot. And then you can only imagine that psychology in Israel after October 7th and the huge cities are not usually major towns are evacuated until further notice and people

are in bomb shelters and there's hostages being tortured and raped. So the fact that these people could overshoot and try to calibrate, which is I think actually what they did, their humanitarian responsibility such that we're not going to let them starve, but we're not going to flood them with food either, and maybe some hope that on top of everything else that this might cause people to rise up. Who knows what they're thinking? This is the most viscerally emotional situation people can be in,

and all of which is to say that I am not going to, going to be shocked to find that Israelis, let alone far, you know, well, I wouldn't call Netanyahu far right, but he's worried about losing the far right in his coalition. So all of that, it's a very, very bad formula there. And nothing would shock me that it turns out to be true. So I guess what I'm saying is, I love my people. And I'm not, that doesn't mean they couldn't have done anything horrible, but I still demand that it be proven properly. That's all. And, you know, I think that's a proper opinion on my part. So I forgot what we're talking about. So maybe we should move on to, and I'll let you take the narrative here. So come March, I think

it is in 2025, Israel changes things in a very meaningful way. You want to, explain that? So in March of 2025, the ceasefire was broken. Each side at the other broke it first. And Israel

imposed a total blockade on Gaza. And while continuing intense military operations. And the over the following

weeks, the warnings of imminent unfolding famine began to intensify, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you have that level of deprivation of food, in a very short period of time, it's a sort of starvation experiment. People will begin to starve. And the nature of starvation is that not everyone starves equally. I mean, sadly, when it's used as a weapon of war, it's a weapon of war that is sort of inversely targeted. It's targeted on the weakest. You know if there's a besieged population and there are armed men there, they will be the last ones to starve. They will make sure they get their food.

And it is the poorest, the most vulnerable, who will be deported. deprived first and there was some you know the information was never good enough in any food emergency but there was enough good information to predict that under those conditions you know food security would deteriorate very very rapidly to the point of famine conditions and at the end of July the the UN the the famine review committee of of the UN gave an something it's not done before because it didn't have any new data, it was just inferring from what, the old data. So there will be famine, that we can expect this.

And then on the 22nd of August, both the US FUSNET, Firmine Early Warning System and the UN IPCs, classified the situation in northern Gaza as having crossed that threshold, having crossed two key thresholds, One being what they call acute food insecurity, the amount of food that people have and what they have to do to get it, and the other being child malnutrition. They didn't classify it as having crossed the mortality threshold because they had no measurements. So they called it famine on the best evidence. And the Israel, as its pattern, it heavily criticized the UN. It said nothing against the US for having set the same. same thing. Now my argument here would be that this actually worked. This was a a famine

classification that had immediate impact. In fact even before the famine alert and the amount of attention that was getting to the situation in the first weeks of August and I was one of those who was sounding this alarm and then as I said earlier I was making the point but this is a situation that can be turned on its head reversed within a matter of days. If Benjamin Netanyahu wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow, he could do it. And so by the end of August, by September, the gates had again opened and the food situation improved. And by, I think it was October, when the new data came in, the UN reclassified it as no longer famine. And I think it was, I mean, for me what was very revealing about this episode

was first of all that the UN system did its job. Yes, Israel challenged it, but if you look at the details of the challenge, they're really sort of spitting hairs as to how you measured malnutrition here was, did it cross the 15% threshold or was it 14.9%. These sorts of things that really you know, are very, very much at the margin. Well, can I say something? I want to say something. I think you're going to agree with this. And then I want to ask you, you know, for what you think the actual numbers are.

As I understand it, you know, so famine is, is the most common definition is two deaths for every 10,000 people per day. So, yeah. So let me just. I'll come back to you on that. Let me take my point. And that's stage five. And I think one of the psychological risks here with this kind of rating system is that people tend to think, well, as long as it's not stage five, what's your problem? You know, like everything is like pass-fail.

Like everything is on stage five. But the description of stage four, to the extent a nation like Israel could avoid it. by flooding, and I don't understand that they couldn't flooding Gaza with food, dropping food. I don't know what is possible. It is possible, but it doesn't seem to me like they were wearing themselves out, trying to keep Gaza flush with food. And so I would just want to say to everybody that, you know, don't hang your hat on the fact that Israel might have just kept them at stage four.

Now, Israel might have reasons that they claim that stage four is what, you know, it's a war and this is the best we could do. I don't know what the arguments are. But I would just say, I think taking your point of view for a second, like it's not all about stage five. Even if it's not technically a famine, there's a lot of suffering going on. So I think this is a very, very important point. And by the way, I would say that famine is not necessarily. necessarily defined by that mortality threshold. It is by, and the famine in Gaza was defined by two of the three thresholds, the acute food

insecurity and the malnutrition, not by the mortality. But I saw that slide that said all three, from the IPC, that all three had to be met. That's why I got it from. But that's, but what the IPC said was, I forget the exact phrase, but famine according to the best evidence. So they said we do not have evidence for the mortality. Well, let me ask. So do you mean that you could have a famine and fewer than two per 10,000 people are dying?

So actually, so here we get back to the other point, which is that famine is not just, and indeed starvation, is not just an issue of biological survival. It's also a social issue. The experience of starvation, if you read the accounts of the Wussle Ghetto, of, of, of, the siege of Leningrad of Auschwitz. It is the experience of being deprived of your humanity. In the English language, you know, companion, the word is from sharing bread. All societies are built around the principle that your humanity is expressed by certain social values and practices and foundational to those is sharing bread. Now one of the things that happens, and this is actually the main sort of thrust of my analysis over 40 years on famine is that the experience of famine

is the social experience of degradation, humiliation, shame. It's a bit like, you know, survivors of rape who blame themselves, who are internalized this feeling that they are being dehumanized, deprived of their humanity. And that is as important as in the experience of famine, as actually biological hunger and loss of life. And one of the ways that people respond to this is by finding ways to protect the most vulnerable, often, and one of the things that we have seen, which has been most notable in the situation in Gaza.

We also saw this in Syria, is adult women sacrificing themselves, their own health and hunger to protect their children. And the acute food insecurity is sort of a not very good measure of these elements of what people need to do, the degrading things they need to do, hiding food from your neighbors. Can I add? Can I add something to that? Yeah. So if you read Elie Wiesel's Knight, is that what it's called, Night? You know, I read it whenever I read it.

And the only thing I remember from it were the tales of Weizel and someone else there, he describes, where they were being, you know, upset to see that their father was still alive, trying to lose their father. And then living with this for the rest of their lives, which is just exactly what we're describing, being driven to the psychological breaking point where they were betraying their own parents for hunger, things like this. So, yeah, I think that's what you're saying. So I take your point.

You know, the situation in Gaza was not Auschwitz, but if you read Primo Levi, you know, he, you know, he says the camp was hunger. And he uses the German word freshen, which is how animals eat for describing how they eat, how they ate. They were not eating in a civilized way. And this was, you know, and this is part of the trauma. Okay, we're talking generally, but let's see. Now, did this happen in Gaza? How many people died from March, March 2025 till the ceasefire of starvation?

So there's two points here. One is this experience of humiliation, of trauma, being forced to live in degrading animal-like circumstances has been the experiences of people in Gaza in the years since October, 2023. And one of the things that I find, you know, particularly shameful, I mean, my family on my father's side with Jews who were driven out of Austria in 1938.

And my personal reason for getting involved in this field back in the 1980s was that experience. Was the family's experience of being forced to become refugees, of hunger of humiliation and I said let me go to a place it was Sudan where people are studying and experiencing this and understand what is the personal individual social experience of this type of deprivation so that that is my personal motivation for doing it and that and that is also my deep sense of shock that i see you know a Jewish community inflicting this suffering that they themselves have undergone that they experience more deeply, profoundly than possibly anyone else.

Okay, but you still have to prove it. You know, now there's one stat that you don't use it, but I found it to be, again, commonsensically very convincing. And it came out of Israeli scholars, actually, was tracking the price of flour, which throughout the conflict, flour was, you know, more expensive than usual. and then whenever it was March or April, it shot up by like 3,700, you know, and then for like two months and then went back down.

And there's just no way, I mean, markets do tell us something. Obviously, when something shoots up in price like that is because people don't have it. And then, of course, some people are able to buy it at that high price and then other people go without. Now, that can be not simply that it doesn't, exist, it can be hoarding. Like we've all, we've talked about this before.

We all experienced this when there was no toilet paper anywhere in America, yet there was no shortage, there was no lack of toilet paper. It was just people were scared they wouldn't be able to get it tomorrow, which I'm sure is a big part of that story. When Israel announced that it was cutting off food, immediately, if you're a rational actor, you go out and you buy every last bit of flour that you can, right? Parole almost is sunny. Yes, and perhaps not that it matters if one is starving to death,

but I do think that as a matter of record, it does need to be said that, for my understanding, we do have it on fairly good authority, that there were trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks of food going into Israel. Excuse me, into Gaza, and Hamas was hoarding. I don't believe, I don't know if that's true. Well, I mean, it, I would like to go on record that there are some, pretty legit arguments that I've seen.

There are some examples and also the UN just wrote a letter actually now criticizing Hamas for interfering with the delivery of aid. And that Hamas was hoarding a lot of this. And again, not that it matters if you're the person starving to death, but I do think that it does need to be said. Yeah. I mean, these to me are claims which are murky. I don't know what your opinion on all those things are.

For me, I go with the U.S. investigation, which was not able to find significant amounts of Hamas diversion and hoarding in 2024 into 2025. I don't know about more recently. And the U.S. I don't think is going to be speaking up for Hamas. There are always incidents, and some of the incidents of armed. men on trucks, I think, have been legitimately ascribed to local community groups wanting to protect, not Hamas. But I don't, I can't make a judgment. You are aware of what happened in July of 2026 with the UN, I have it in front of me, statement by the United Nations Special Coordinator for Middle East Process. I strongly condemn the recent obstruction of humanitarian operations in Gaza

by the de facto authorities, which endangermentary and personnel, intimidated workers delivering. So, so of course, when you read this, you say to yourself, well, it's certainly does make the accusations in the past all the more plausible. I don't have a sense for how much food you would have to hoard in order to actually make a dent, such a profound dent in people's ability to get food. And then, of course, couldn't Israel just, you know, compensate by putting more food in? I'm sorry, sorry. I'll say, I think we have to come to grips with the fact. that in some way they were calibrating. That's what I really believe.

I don't think they wanted anybody to starve. It doesn't serve their purposes to have anybody starve. It's bad for them to have people starve. But this calibration, and I can make analogies to other thing, it's hubris and arrogance because it's too complex. You can't calibrate these kind of things. And when do you know, like a thermostat, when do you know it's time for the air conditioner to kick back on?

when it gets too hot. When do you know it's time to kick the food back up? When there's not quite enough of it. And that, I think, is, we have to face that. You know, and you can hear a hard line argument and say, fuck it, it's war. Then make the arguments. But that's different than pretending it didn't happen.

You understand? Like, I can listen to say, listen, compare it to every other war, tell me what's different. Like, this war is not for the side harder. I'm interested to learn about what's real. But that's different again than saying it didn't happen. Go ahead. So let me make a couple of points.

One is that I think the, as the English say, the proof of the pudding is the eating. So when food was made available, then the situation changed. So, you know, Israel could at any time have prevented this disaster. you want to describe it, food emergency, catastrophe, famine from happening, it was within its capacity. It had no impact on the military factor. But you still haven't put any, because, you know, the UNICEF thing shows it, they sprung back right away from whatever it was.

The stunting is slightly more, but still below basically every other Arab country. There's, it would be a tremendous number of missing people. not if it really adds up to mass starvation here. We haven't done a census. We don't know how many people are missing. I mean, the only decent, rigorous survey is the Mike Spaggart one, which only has date up to January of 2025. Doesn't cover the, doesn't cover the year 2025.

And in terms of recovery, I mean, it was clear that, nutritional recovery was underway as early as October so the the June nutrition server by UNICEF which by the way didn't again didn't cover all the areas didn't cover all of North Casa was not was not surprising I would say that what it showed was it was a population of children who were basically eating flour oil and sugar the the micronutrient issue has not has has intensified there is a problem there with my with with micronutriets. But the fact that the population of sort of the energy malnutrition bounced back,

that is entirely unsurprising. And because the period of deprivation was not, you know, over the lifetime of these children, it was a particular period, then the stunting rates will be low. So I don't think that survey should be taken as anything other than evidence for the fact that the clamor, the humanitarian's clamor for action actually worked. I did some, you know, tried to do some math to try to figure out what it was. And, you know, and I took the number of 940,000 people,

because I think that's what was the governorate or whatever they call it. Over 46 days is what I used. It would be 180. There would be 8,300 deaths in 46 days, if this is a famine, including, you know, thousands of children, this is far in excess of the number of people who died in bombs during that time, meaning you could have one point something,

if not two starving deaths to every violent death in that 46 days. That just doesn't seem like that could have happened. Like, you know, I mean, maybe it did, but again, you have to prove it. You can't just say it. You have to prove it. Yeah, but you also, So if you want to, I mean, let me push back on this.

Sure. Israel has simply not allowed the data gathering to occur that would allow us to establish one way or the other. That's, you know, there is every single report from the IPC and every other humanitarian data gatherer says, we need more data. Well, we have some data. The Gaza Ministry of Health doesn't claim these numbers. They said 190 or 200 or 100, I think 190 malnutrition deaths in that period, now, or a little bit wider period. Now, I know that, I know that you've said, and we've established that malnutrition deaths

are just one subset of people who die. But you're talking about 190 versus 8,000. Like Gaza Ministry of Health, they know how many people have died. Why are they not telling us? Like, they could tell us and we could say, we don't believe you, but they're not even claiming it. They know. The Gaza Ministry of Health tabulates the trauma deaths.

And Israel kept saying over many months, these numbers were exaggerated, these numbers were Hamas numbers. They've all been validated. Those numbers of, I forget how many 70 or 1,000 people killed in bombing and another trauma deaths, those are validated. Can I tell you something? I don't interrupt you a lot only because we're getting to the end. But I want to tell you something about the Gaza Minister of Health. that hold your thought and remember where you were. I was not, I mean, I was skeptical of God's ministry of health,

especially when they said that those 221 people died in that hospital thing. However, there was one thing that made me hold my fire as soon as I heard it. I heard Benjamin Netanyahu on, you know this, I heard Benjamin Netanyahu being interviewed by Barry Weiss. And he kind of let slip a number. I don't remember what the number was at the time of how many people had died. and it was basically the Gaza Ministry of Health number. And I said, ah, I said, I better shut up about challenging these numbers

because it's, you know, Netanyahu didn't come out with a number that was half as much. So, you know, like you look for these little threads to pull on if you're a sophisticated observer of what's going on. So go ahead. Continue what you were saying. And then the, and then they register the deaths, the non-trauma deaths that occur in hospital that they have diagnosed for. And, actually, I mean, this is a small point, but in the Syrian war, because dying of starvation is so shameful, because the family has failed to provide for the individual that's been, that, that has starved. In the Syrian war, there was virtually zero starvation deaths recorded. They were all heart attack. Even a child of two who had wasted away was heart attack. Because the family doesn't want to have that trauma. It's like a, like a survivor. of rape not wanting to have on her record that she had been sexually violated. But your question is about the overall numbers. I'm saying if you had to make a polymark, you guess, it's like, yeah, I get Israel doesn't,

are they still not letting people and take that? I don't know. But you're talking about 8,000 or so corpses in a short time and it's a tiny place and everybody's got a cell phone and you have a Ghana, Gaza Ministry of Health that's highly motivated to report this or to claim it. even and at best of saying, well, we think it must have happened because we haven't heard to the contrary. No, no, no.

We need evidence that happened. No, what I'm saying, what I'm saying is, is that, you know, we're having this discussion about data because Israel has refused to allow credible organizations to collect the data that would prove it one way or the other. How did Spaggett do it? How did Spaggett do it? He, well, he did it through a, a small, randomized partial survey that didn't cover the whole population.

But why don't they do it again? Why doesn't he follow up with another one? Well, the authoritative way, well I'm talking to him about doing that, but the authoritative way to do that is to have a census. Let's have a census. Let's actually find out. Let's really go and find out what the truth is about this. Instead of debating around incomplete partial surveys, I had my research assistant look and there have been more than than 80 publications which have got numbers for deaths. And his is the only one that actually stands up to script.

But it's been a year and a half since he did it. And listen, if you want to claim, if you want to knock Israel for not allowing this census and even say that the fact that they won't allow it is somehow indicative that they have something to hide, I'll accept all that. But I don't see how anybody can claim there were two people per 10,000 dying in Gaza.

without any evidence. What's the evidence? Let me repeat the point that I made several times. First of all, the IPC, its diagnostics of famine, did not depend upon that mortality. It made no comment on the mortality. It was based upon nutrition and it was based upon acute food insecurity. And the second point is that the experience of famine and the experience of the people of Gaza was of that deprivation. of that dehumanization of that, of being deprived of what it is to function as a, as a dignified

human being. Will you accept this? Will you accept this position? Because I think I've already demonstrated, but I just wanted to reiterate it, I do not minimize this kind of emotional trauma that you're describing. I don't. Especially, again, especially, it's always weighed against, could it have been? been avoided? What would it have taken to avoid it? And, you know, on that, I think it's tough for Israel

to make a good case that there was just, there was just no way we could get more food in there. I don't, I don't believe that. But yet, I do think that when you, when people read about famine, although you understand famine has other facets to it, people read, this is mass death. And it has to be clarified. We're not saying mass death. We're meaning psychological suffering. And, you know, I understand maybe that's not as powerful. And maybe they're afraid that that won't get the world's heart in the same way that death does.

And yes, you're right. Some things may be worse than death to someone who lives through it. I don't judge any of this. But I'm just saying that normally when we speak about famine, it's about people dying. and then now we've kind of backed into, so I never said they were dying, I'm saying it was, and I think that many people say,

well, I didn't know that's what you meant. If I'd known that's what you meant, I probably wouldn't even have said it's ridiculous because I don't think you need to have a famine. You could have stage four, or you could have, I mean, you could have a lot of stages

where people are being humiliated, right? And by the way, not just through hunger. There's all sorts of aspects of the war, which are equally degrading and humiliating and traumatizing to this. I mean, what I find problematic

with the position you're taking is that you are you are arguing around a semantic definition. I think people need to understand what's being said, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And those of us

who have spent our lifetime studying this, you are saying, okay, let's set aside the expertise of those who study it and the metrics of those who study it and focus on one, one, you know, public, perhaps misconception about famine, and then discard the other points that we are trying to make.

And the key point being that there was a level of human suffering, of deprivation, of extreme hunger, of humiliation, and including excess deaths, not as many as was feared, thank goodness, but many. And civilian suffering that was, A, unacceptable, B, unnecessary. And C could have been reversed at any moment without Israel suffering from any military disadvantage in undertaking its campaign against Hamas. And that, to me, is really unacceptable.

That to me is a real blot on Israel. I take your point, and I don't really dispute. I think academics and people who know a lot sometimes have a responsibility to also be aware of what the word that they have an expert knowledge of means. in everyday parlance. You know, I got caught up on this. You think I would have known the difference between a concentration camp

and a death camp, but I didn't know it one time. So when people say, this is a concentration camp, I said, wait a time. I don't see any gas chambers. And someone had to explain to me, no, idiot. That's not what a concentration camp is. But I know that, you know, 99 or 97 out of 100 people

took it the same way I did. And I also know that the people who were using the term knew that and banked on it and didn't think they needed to correct. it. I'm not accusing you of that. And I just think that when you know that the word is not clear to the everyday Joe, then it should be explained in the same portion as you tell them it's a famine. And just to be clear, when we use famine, we mean psychological degradation every bit as much as we mean deaths.

Now, I do dispute you that slide from IPC does refer to the deaths. But you guys maybe, maybe there's some grumbling of changing that definition. Maybe there's two schools of thought. The IPC slide definitely says two out of a 10,000 or four out of something children. It does say that, but that was not what they said when they said they were saying famine with reasonable evidence. It's a model, I know, I get it. And they were very clear that they did not have evidence for those deaths.

All right. And we need to go and find out. We really need to go and find out. All right. So I'm going to give you, Perry, I'm going to give you, Perry else wants to yap something, and then I'm going to give you the last word. Listen, I think this has been a very good conversation. I don't think I've seen a better conversation on this subject,

even half as good as this one. So I'm, and that's a credit to you and your good faith. So go ahead, Perry, all, then I'm going to give you the last word to say whatever you want. You're going to let me ruin the conversation? No, go ahead. First of all, I would like to go on record and say that it was not my fault, that Professor Doolal did not get the link. Okay.

And I'd also like to just go on record here, since that seems to be my role for this show, and say that there was somebody else during the course of all of these horrors that were starving to death intentionally. And that was the hostages that seem to have not been mentioned throughout the course of any of this. It's not part of this conversation.

Well, it is now, because I just brought it up. Okay, okay. And I don't think that you can have this conversation, frankly, without bringing up the hostages who were very intentionally without any question being starved to death. You're not helping our side. She doesn't mean collective punishment, just clearly. She doesn't mean that. I did an interview for Fox News. I forget when it was.

And we went through this argument. And at the end of it, he said, times up. And I said, but I haven't mentioned the hostages. I said, let me stay on because I want to make exactly that point. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. And so he came back to me. I had an extra one minute after the commercial break to make that point.

So I'm reprising that. Okay, you're going to get an extra minute now, too. Go ahead. My mic's just up. Oh, there is. I stand corrected. Okay. So, and anything else you want to say about the?

the entire subject. I mean, there are many other places in the world that are suffering starvation, one that is close to my heart, which is particularly egregious at the moment, is Sudan, which is suffering famine on an unparalleled scale. And I think what the case of Gaza shows us is that, you know, we should have it in ourselves to prevent these appalling and unnecessary suffering happening anywhere that is in the world. We should make really no exceptions to preventing hunger,

which is almost everywhere in the world where we see starvation it is man-made. All right, sir, thank you very much for joining us, as I, not to everybody, but to many guests, If you ever come to New York, I'd be very happy to host you and have a drink with you and maybe you want to come see a show. Alex DeWall, Professor Alex DeWall, everybody. Thank you very much. Good night, sir.

Thank you. Good night.