The ‘14,000 dead babies’ smear shows how low Israel’s critics will sink

When questioned, the UN backtracked a little. “We need to get the supplies in as soon as possible, ideally within the next 48 hours,” a spokesman for UNOCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

I don’t know about you, but the word “ideally” strikes something of a bum note. It obviously struck a bum note for the BBC reporter as well, because they followed it up again.

This time, they were pointed to a recent report by another UN agency, the catchily-named Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which stated that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition were expected to occur – expected to occur! – between April 2025 and March 2026 – that’s over a period of a year – amongst children between the ages of four-and-a-half and six years old.

Let’s get this straight. No babies were mentioned in the report. The acute malnutrition was a projection, it hadn’t actually taken place in the real world. And this phantom suffering was feared to take place over the course of a year, not two days.

All of this translated to a claim made on the BBC’s flagship programme, and repeated all over the world, that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours.

For one thing, this achievement by the BBC is almost enough to make you forgive the indiscretions of Gary Lineker. Of course, the broadcaster should by rights be pushing this debunked canard towards the top of its news agenda, as it certainly would if Israel had been found to have made such an egregious error. But let’s applaud the baby steps. This was spectacular.

For another, it underlines what we knew all along: the United Nations is not to be trusted. If you hadn’t been persuaded by the fact that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the October 7 atrocities, such as Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who killed 16 young people as they cowered in a bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im before seizing four hostages, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin; or by the fact that ten per cent of UNRWA staff, or about 1,200 people, were found by Israeli intelligence to belong to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad; or by the fact that weapons and hostages have been held in UN facilities; or that terrorists have based themselves at its schools; or that its aid has been passed to Hamas; then this surely would convince you.

This is all part of an overwhelming propaganda campaign that has been launched since Israel resumed the war in Gaza.

The internet has been swamped with lies, vitriol, memes and images of suffering children. The airwaves have been swamped with it too, with activist doctors giving implausible interviews from Gaza – one even compared it to the Cambodian genocide, in which more than a million people were murdered by communist troops with knives, axes and hammers – and all manner of Hollywood stars and commentators of every description searching their brains for the most poisonous turns of phrase they can think of.

Last but not least, to this ignominious list we must add our own foreign secretary, David Lammy, who turned on Israel with some viciousness yesterday in a prelude to an expected unilateral recognition of a State of Palestine next month.

How shameful. If this is what happens when Israel tries to win a war, imagine the delight of these people if it were ever – God forbid – to lose.