NGOs discussed proving Gaza ‘famine’ to ‘pressure’ Israel two years ago, WHO official claims

Thieren made the claim during on the French language podcast Mosaïque, in a discussion with journalist Antoine Mercier. During the 30-minute conversation, he also spoke about the charge of genocide against Israel, saying that, although he’s withholding judgment – “the reports will come, we’ll judge then" – many of his colleagues had made up their minds just months into the war. 

“When we talk about genocide, the WHO never went there, others did – but very early, these people pronounced these two terms [genocide and famine], they were thrown out right from the start.

"So the crimes were already predetermined, and then the organisations tried to demonstrate them. And for me, that is not normal at all,” he continued.

“There is often a kind of enjoyment [in accusing Israel]… And that’s where, for me, all these accounts – wherever they come from – are tinged with antisemitism.”

Thieren, who took one of the first flights to Israel after October 7, also spoke movingly about the aftermath of the Hamas attack. 

“For the third time in my life, I saw what a land of massacre looks like,” he said. 

“I could describe to you what a land of massacre is, but it’s that kind of landscape – very silent, echoing, muffled – as I say, frozen in a sort of Pompeii of murder. I’ve always felt that a land of massacre is not a land of war. I was in Syria: you see lands of war there. It’s not the same thing. A land of massacre is a land of massacre.

“And what I saw at Be’eri and at Nova was a land of massacre – unmistakably.”

The medic, who began his career with with Médecins sans Frontières in 1989 and has since worked in Cambodia and Democratic Republic of Congo, also criticised the nature of the discourse since October 7, saying: “There’s this desire to say ‘yes, but there’s context.’ No, there is no context [to October 7]. There is no possible context for Hamas’s murder. It is absolutely impossible.”