When it comes to Gaza, the dumbing down of definitions is a growing trend: If the accepted definition of genocide fails to describe Israel’s war against the genocidal Hamas fighters, a new definition must be found. Famine? If the shoe doesn’t fit, let’s not acquit. When weather phenomena won’t cooperate, they too must be re-defined. 

Israel’s Channel 12 television recently gained access to the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom crossing. The TV crew filmed a large number of trucks loaded with food that passed Israel Defense Force inspection. The food ended up rotting due to the failure of the United Nations and other aid agencies in distributing the trucks’ content. 

UN officials have reported that Gaza is on the “verge” of famine since even before Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Since Hamas launched the war, the United Nations and its agencies have intensified the warnings, repeating them almost daily, even as they shied from declaring that Gaza is indeed undergoing famine. 

“Many food-security experts, aid workers, and doctors say famine took hold in Gaza many months ago,” according to a Reuters “special report” Monday. Yet, an international body charged with determining the degree of food insecurities, known as IPC, has limited access to data, which makes it difficult to declare famine. Therefore, Reuters reports, “experts now wonder: Is it time to rethink how a famine is defined?” 

The need for a redefinition that would neatly fit a narrative of alleged Israeli cruelty in Gaza came to focus earlier at the Hague-based International Court of Justice. There, South Africa is accusing the Jewish state of violating its obligations under the genocide convention. 

Struggling to prove a necessary component of the 1948 UN convention — an “intent” to destroy all Palestinians — Dublin came to Preroria’s rescue. “Ireland will be asking the ICJ to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state,” the Irish foreign minister, Micheal Martin, said. 

“Redefining famine and redefining genocide — this is something Hamas is absolutely for,” the editor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal, Joe Truzman, tells the Sun. “Hamas will even go a bit further, and instead of helping Palestinian civilians, it exacerbates the issue.”

Exacerbating and exaggerating civilian hardships is serving Hamas well, as Gazans — as in all wars — are suffering. Even lies that are easily proven false are amplified worldwide.      

A viral video posted on X Tuesday claims to depict a tent in Gaza where a man and his child attempt to fend off the cold with blankets on a cot as heavy snowflakes fall from above. The posting has been viewed by more than half a million account holders. 

“I can no longer endure this oppression and genocide,” the account owner, identified as “Dimple” from Finland, writes. “O Israel, O Netanyahu, may the greatest curses in the world be upon you. May your lineage perish. May your name be erased from the face of the earth. This is my prayer as we enter the new year.”

Yet no one can remember how many decades it has been since it last snowed in Gaza. Tuesday’s lowest temperature there was 51 degrees Fahrenheit, with a 35 percent chance of rain, according to Apple’s weather application. The coldest night expected this week is 43 degrees, while day temperatures are in the mid- to high 60s.

Unidentified social media accounts might be discounted as zany. Yet, global outrage has grown since last week over alleged Palestinian casualties related to the cold.

“Four babies die from hypothermia in Gaza, as Israel’s war pushes Palestinians into tent camps,” CNN reported last Wednesday. By Tuesday the reported cold-related deaths jumped to seven, Ha’aretz reported. Reuters, the BBC, NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and other websites are highlighting the story.  

“If reports about 3 babies freezing to death in Gaza don’t move us then we don’t understand the birth in a manger in Bethlehem,” the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Siebert, wrote on X. 

Israeli officials were livid. “It is expected from an ambassador to rely on verified facts, not assumptions or imaginations,” a foreign ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, said in reaction. “It has already been proven so many times that doctors in Gaza publish Hamas propaganda rather than facts.”

Heavy rains in the areas of tent cities the IDF has built as safe zones for evacuees from battle lead to poor conditions. Infants could well have suffered hypothermia symptoms, and possibly died. “I don’t dispute that there are babies that are possibly dying of hypothermia, which is absolutely a tragedy,” Mr. Truzman, who has long watched Gaza, says.

Yet, he adds, “the headlines are blaming Israel first,” even while Hamas could prevent civilian suffering by ending the war and releasing Israeli hostages. Instead, Hamas is “purposely leveraging the suffering of Palestinians in this war to their benefit, so they can accuse Israel of the so-called genocide.”