A recent Israeli study has concluded that starvation in Gaza resulted from a premeditated policy, despite sustained public denial by the Israeli government and much of the media.
Titled Data for Denial: The Smokescreen Behind the Starvation of Gaza, the study was published last month by the Forum for Regional Thinking at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Its author, Shmuel Lederman, an Israeli scholar specialising in genocide studies, told Middle East Eye that he was motivated by what he described as widespread denial within Israel over starvation in Gaza during the two-year genocide that began in October 2023.
He said such denial among the public was to be expected, drawing comparisons with historical cases of mass violence.
"There is a thirst for denial," Lederman said, with many in Israel seeking to portray the army’s conduct in Gaza and elsewhere as entirely justified or unproblematic.
A report by the Israeli news site Walla in August 2025 similarly suggested that denial or minimisation of the starvation crisis in Gaza was widespread across mainstream television channels.
According to the study, international warnings were frequently dismissed or reframed to align with official Israeli narratives. Some commentators acknowledged starvation only in mid-2025, attributing it to isolated miscalculations rather than to broader policy decisions.