World Health Organisation adviser says ‘famine’ term was used to pressure Israel
World Health Organisation representative in Israel reveals that at a December 2023 Geneva meeting the term “famine” was explicitly discussed as a communication tool in the Gaza war
A senior WHO-appointed medical expert in Israel has claimed that humanitarian organisations convened in Geneva in December 2023 to discuss how to apply the term “famine” in the context of the Gaza conflict and that the aim was in part to exert political pressure on Israel.
Dr. Michel Thieren, WHO representative to Israel, told the French-Israeli podcast “Mosaïque” that he attended a multilateral governance meeting about Gaza in Geneva. He said that towards the end of the meeting “there was a gathering of experts who asked the question quite forcefully. I… was absolutely stunned. What they were saying, essentially, was that one should try to find a term that could be used to exert pressure.”
According to Thieren, at that point the discussion assumed from the outset that Israel was the perpetrator and that the Palestinian side was the victim. He said: “When these people were saying it would be necessary to demonstrate famine, the guilt had already been assigned (to Israel). … The crimes were already predetermined, and then the organisations tried to demonstrate them.”
Thieren said WHO itself did not adopt the terminology of genocide in relation to Gaza, though he noted that the other organisations “threw out” the terms “genocide” and “famine” “right from the start.” He added: “The reports will come, we’ll judge then,” but he expressed concern over the “length and detail” of certain reports when compared to past cases such as the Rwandan genocide.
On the narrative framing of the conflict, Thieren remarked: “There’s this kind of… we describe, we announce, we tell the story of this war with a certain pleasure. All these accounts – wherever they come from – are tinged with antisemitism.”
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