British media promote UN’s ‘14,000 dead babies’ lie
The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, LBC and The National were among the UK outlets which uncritically promoted the incendiary, unevidenced claim by the UN yesterday that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die within the next 48 hours” unless sufficient aid is delivered to the territory.
The claim, by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), was made on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Fletcher told presenter Anna Foster that “there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them” and provide them with baby food. Fletcher didn’t cite evidence, and, tellingly, when Foster asked him how they calculated those figures, he merely said that “we have strong teams on the ground”, before changing the subject.
In addition to media reports which uncritically promoted Fletcher’s unsubstantiated claim, it immediately made its way to Parliament. Here’s a question posed to foreign secretary David Lammy by Labour MP Joe Powell:
The UN is now warning that 14,000 babies in Gaza face starvation in the next 48 hours.
— Joe Powell MP (@josephpowell) May 20, 2025
The situation could not be more serious.
I welcome the Government suspending trade talks with Israel and imposing tougher sanctions today — but as we've done on other countries, including… pic.twitter.com/w8tSXsM823
Fletcher’s accusation began to unravel later that same day when “asked to confirm that [14,000] figure at a news conference, a UN spokesman avoided repeating it“. Instead, he said there were babies in “urgent life-saving need of supplements”, because their mothers were “unable to feed themselves”.
To its credit, BBC later asked for further clarification from UNOCHA, which said: “We are pointing to the imperative of getting supplies in to save an estimated 14,000 babies suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Gaza, as the IPC partnership has warned about. We need to get the supplies in as soon as possible, ideally within the next 48 hours”.
However, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in question stated that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026. So, the IPC report says that this severe acute malnutrition, not death, could, assuming current aid levels remain the same, take place over the course of about a year – not in the next 48 hours.
So, to recap, the IPC report which Fletcher evidently was citing did NOT say that 14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours unless sufficient food gets to them. It projected that 14,100 children under the age of five could, under certain scenarios, be severely malnourished over the next 11 months. Finally, even this projection should be treated with skepticism given that the IPC’s 2024 projection of famine in Gaza turned out to be completely wrong.
We’ve contacted the Guardian, Independent, LBC and the National urging them to correct their articles to note what they were reporting as fact was a hoax. To date, Tom Fletcher has not apologised for his libel.
Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK (formerly UK Media Watch and BBC Watch) which is the UK division of the US based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), the 65,000 member media monitoring and research organization founded in 1982.
