The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, LBC and The National were among the UK outlets which uncritically promoted the incendiary, unevidenced claim by the UN yesterday that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die within the next 48 hours” unless sufficient aid is delivered to the territory.
The claim, by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), was made on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Fletcher told presenter Anna Foster that “there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them” and provide them with baby food. Fletcher didn’t cite evidence, and, tellingly, when Foster asked him how they calculated those figures, he merely said that “we have strong teams on the ground”, before changing the subject.
In addition to media reports which uncritically promoted Fletcher’s unsubstantiated claim, it immediately made its way to Parliament. Here’s a question posed to foreign secretary David Lammy by Labour MP Joe Powell:
Fletcher’s accusation began to unravel later that same day when “asked to confirm that [14,000] figure at a news conference, a UN spokesman avoided repeating it“. Instead, he said there were babies in “urgent life-saving need of supplements”, because their mothers were “unable to feed themselves”.
To its credit, BBC later asked for further clarification from UNOCHA, which said: “We are pointing to the imperative of getting supplies in to save an estimated 14,000 babies suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Gaza, as the IPC partnership has warned about. We need to get the supplies in as soon as possible, ideally within the next 48 hours”.
However, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in question stated that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026. So, the IPC report says that this severe acute malnutrition, not death, could, assuming current aid levels remain the same, take place over the course of about a year – not in the next 48 hours.
So, to recap, the IPC report which Fletcher evidently was citing did NOT say that 14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours unless sufficient food gets to them. It projected that 14,100 children under the age of five could , under certain scenarios, be severely malnourished over the next 11 months. Finally, even this projection should be treated with skepticism given that the IPC’s 2024 projection of famine in Gaza turned out to be completely wrong.
We’ve contacted the Guardian, Independent, LBC and the National urging them to correct their articles to note what they were reporting as fact was a hoax. To date, Tom Fletcher has not apologised for his libel.
Having heard the Fletcher interview live I was astounded that Anna Foster did not press him for an answer because had he been an Israeli government spokesman such as David Mencer, she in the tradition of the BBC Today program would not have let him continue without an answer.
We have therefore identified the BBC is the leader in promoting International Anti Semitism. It is biased against Jews!
The BBC are worse then the others – as they did the digging and saw it was a lie. Instead of doing a BBC Verify showing how this is a lie – they buried the fact in the 15th paragraph of an article titled “Gaza aid yet to reach civilians, UN says, as pressure grows on Israel”.
The original Lie is still on the BBC Website – with no comments under it.
The NYT ran this claim on the front page on 21 May:
A senior U.N. humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, told the BBC on Tuesday that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours unless truckloads of aid could enter. He said thousands of trucks, some containing baby food, were ready to move in.
The online version of the story was later changed to the following without noting this as a correction:
Tom Fletcher, a senior U.N. humanitarian official, claimed on Tuesday that 14,000 babies in Gaza might die in the next two days unless aid entered. But the United Nations later appeared to walk back his remarks: asked for comment, a U.N. spokeswoman did not defend the claim, instead saying that “lifesaving supplies need to get in as soon as possible.”