Updated: A UN Official, Then Journalists, Lied About 14,000 Babies

When a senior UN official told the BBC that thousands of babies would die in a matter of days, the claim quickly spread across the global media. That would be understandable — the allegation is indeed “extraordinary,” as the BBC interviewer put it, and “chilling,” as UN official replied — were it not abjectly false.

In his interview with the BBC yesterday, Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, claimed, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them” with humanitarian aid. Other UK journalists quickly echoed the claim, as did media outlets across the world, among them NBC News and Time Magazine; El Pais and EFE in Spain; the Evening Report in New Zealand; Deutsche Welle in Germany; ABC in Australia; and RFI in France.

A popular children’s content creator who goes by the name “Ms. Rachel,” with 15 million followers on YouTube, told her social media followers: “The UN just warned that 14,000 babies may starve to death within 48 hours. Please everyone say something for these babies. Please leaders, say something.”

The Irish Independent did say something, likely reflecting what many felt as they read the news: “Immorality of Israeli government knows no bounds as the world looks on in horror,” the headline to its editorial that day declared.

But soon, mostly in smaller print, the truth trickled out.

A New York Times story (which seems to have been updated after initially echoing the false claim) now reports,

Tom Fletcher, a senior U.N. humanitarian official, claimed on Tuesday that 14,000 babies in Gaza might die in the next two days unless aid entered. But the United Nations later appeared to walk back his remarks: asked for comment, a U.N. spokeswoman did not defend the claim, instead saying that “lifesaving supplies need to get in as soon as possible.”

And buried in a follow-up piece by the BBC was a more thorough clarification:

Earlier, the UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC thousands of babies could die in Gaza if Israel does not immediately let aid in.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Mr Fletcher said: “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”

When pressed on how he had arrived at that figure, he said there were “strong teams on the ground” operating in medical centres and schools – but did not provide further details.

The BBC later asked for clarification on the figure from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (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.”

It highlighted a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) which stated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026.

The IPC report says this could take place over the course of about a year – not 48 hours.

In other words, Fletcher fabricated the 48-hour timeline — and also the morbid outcome itself. Severe acute malnutrition, though certainly serious, is not the same as death. According to a World Health Organization definition,

In children who are 6–59 months of age, severe acute malnutrition is defined by a very low weight-for-height/weight-for-length, or clinical signs of bilateral pitting oedema, or a very low mid-upper arm circumference. Severe acute malnutrition affects an estimated 19 million children under 5 years of age worldwide and is estimated to account for approximately 400,000 child deaths each year.

Early identification of severe acute malnutrition is important for initiating treatment and minimizing the risk of complications. This can be done in both community and health-care settings using appropriate indicators.

In this accounting, two percent of the 19 million cases of severe acute malnutrition globally are predicted to result in death. If one can extrapolate this to the IPC’s warning about Gaza, there would be an expected 300 deaths from 14,100 cases of severe acute malnutrition. But as the BBC follow-up highlighted, there aren’t that many cases — and OCHA continued to misinform the public even when it backtracked. Contrary to the UN body’s clarification, the IPC report’s figure is not an assessment of the situation today, but rather a prediction that there could be that number cases in children under five (not “babies”) without an increase in humanitarian aid. Levels of aid entering Gaza have already increased.

Jewish journalists and social media users were most emphatic in drawing attention to Fletcher’s disinformation, though the widely-read Times of India also prominently pointed to the falsehood.

NBC News, which initially declared that “around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours,” later updated their piece with a clarification that read: “This article has been updated to clarify that the U.N. now says 14,000 babies face severe malnutrition if a lot more aid trucks don’t reach Gaza soon. U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher had said earlier that 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if more aid wasn’t delivered.”

A History of Falsehoods

This isn’t the only egregious falsehood for which Tom Fletcher and OCHA are responsible. OCHA’s casualty portal, which counts and classifies casualties in the conflict between Israel and Palestinian terror groups, absurdly claims that every West Bank fatality since 2008 — including scores of senior terror leaders, gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, knife-attackers, and other non-civilians — was a “civilian.” The portal continues to misinform after CAMERA notified the UN and Fletcher himself of the falsehood.

See also “British Media Promote UN’s ‘14,000 Dead Babies’ Lie“