In January 2024, the world’s leading famine expert gave Gaza two weeks until catastrophic mass starvation. Alex de Waal wrote the standard textbook on famine, runs the World Peace Foundation, and helped write starvation crimes into international law. When the media says ‘famine experts warn,’ this is who they mean. In January 2024, he did an interview with Owen Jones and made a series of predictions/declarations about starvation in Gaza. 0:00 “I’ve not seen anything like this before” in 40 years 0:21 Famine “probably by early February [2024],” nothing like it in 75 years 1:29 Even a ceasefire cannot stop the deaths, “those deaths are on Israel” 2:33 Starvation deaths “will soon exceed those directly from violence” 2:50 “A catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime” — What actually happened: The IPC’s own Famine Review Committee, June 2024: the famine claims were “not plausible,” and “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.” Gaza’s recorded malnutrition death rate in 2025 (74 deaths through late July, per the WHO) works out to roughly the same per-capita rate as the United States, where the CDC counted over 20,000 malnutrition deaths in 2022. After the October 2025 ceasefire, a UNICEF-led survey found 0.5 percent acute child malnutrition in Gaza, one of the lowest rates in the region. — Every single declaration was false at the time. Every single prediction didn’t happen. The only thing that collapsed in February 2024 was Alex de Waal’s credibility.