NY Times’ Great Insight: ‘Some Trucks’ Carrying Food Enter Gaza

By: Tamar Sternthal August 13, 2024

The New York Times yesterday corrected an Opinion piece containing the demonstrable falsehood that  Israel has imposed a “blanket blockade on food” entering the Gaza Strip. Corrections are meant to clarify, but The Times ostensibly corrective concession that “some trucks have been permitted to enter” does nothing of the sort. 

The correction’s vague language — “some trucks” — could mean any number at all, from five, to 50 to 500, but suggests a minimal amount.

The correction is apparently the editors’ way of throwing a bone towards accountability after opinion editorial assistant Isaac Scher invented in his Aug. 8 commentary that Vice President Kamala Harris “acknowledged that Palestinians in Gaza, subject to Israel’s blanket blockade of food, are ‘eating leaves or animal feed’ to survive.'” [Emphasis added, “What Do Uncommitted Voters Want from Kamala Harris?” Screenshot at left.]

Scher, whose professional experience includes fact-checking books and documentaries, published this factual fib as part of a running larger piece headlined “The Point: Conversations and Insights About the Moment.”

Had Scher bothered to muster any of his fact-checking fortitude he would have found that his momentary “insight” is easily debunked with a 10-second Google search and data from any number of sources, including some very unfriendly to Israel.

According to COGAT, the Israeli authority responsible for coordination of the transfer of aid into the Gaza Strip, of the 850,000 tons of aid transferred to the coastal territory since Oct. 7, 2023, 80 percent was food. As of Aug. 11, this month nearly 21,000 tons of food aid have entered the Gaza Strip, COGAT reported.

On Aug. 7, the day before Scher reported a “blanket blockade of food,” COGAT reported the transfer of 158 trucks carrying humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. On Aug. 8, the date of Scher’s hapless insight, 271 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid entered the coastal territory, according to COGAT.

Last month, 4,629 trucks carrying 23,240 tons of food entered the Gaza Strip, according to COGAT. That’s a daily average of 150 trucks per day, a significant increase compared to the daily average of 75.3 trucks for the first nine months of 2023 prior to the Oct. 7 war which Hamas launched, per data from the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine), the highly problematic U.N. agency which has confirmed that some of its employees “may have been involved” in Hamas’ Oct. 7 wanton slaughter and kidnapping, also keeps running tabs, albeit extremely partial, on the daily entry of food into the Gaza Strip. UNRWA’s incomplete data does not include the commercial food transfers which COGAT counts, and also excludes goods arriving through the Erez East crossing. Nevertheless, UNRWA lists daily transfer of food items donated by organizations such as the World Food Program, UNRWA, Palestinian Red Crescent Society, and more. (Screenshot of UNRWA data for food shipments which entered in the days before Scher’s “blanket blockade” baloney is at left).

Confronted with this data, Times editors felt compelled to revise Scher’s “blanket blockade” insight about the moment. But not by much. In response to correspondence from CAMEA, editors deleted the word “blanket” from the digital article. Furthermore, displaying pseudo-transparency and apparently operating according to the principle “some of the news fit to print,” they appended the following correction to the bottom of the article:

A correction was made on Aug. 11, 2024: 

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the food crisis in Gaza. Although Israel has severely limited the amount of food aid that reaches Palestinians in Gaza, some trucks have been allowed in; the blockade is not a “blanket blockade.”

Israel has long maintained that it does not restrict food entering the Gaza Strip and food shortages are caused by the U.N.’s failure to collect and distribute the food properly once it has entered the territory.

As The New York Times itself reported March 14:

Israel has insisted throughout the war that it is committed to allowing as much aid into Gaza as possible. and it has blamed delays on the U.N. staffing and logistics.

“The issue isn’t the scanning and delivery of aid to Gaza, it’s how much the U.N. can collect and deliver within Gaza,” Col. Elad Goren, an official at the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, known as COGAT, told reporters on Thursday.

The new aid efforts are not immune to some of the same logistical challenges. Israel has said it will continue to conduct strict inspections of supplies entering Gaza, arguing that Hamas could divert items for its use. Food being dropped by air or sea must still be distributed on the ground.

As for the uninformative “some trucks,” the correction’s vague language conceals the actual sums, numbers which clarify rather than mislead. Notably, in the same column, Scher didn’t obfuscate that “some other delegates have pledged their support for Kamala Harris.” He rightly wrote that “4500 other delegates have pledged their support for Kamala Harris.”

Similarly, Scher specified: “About 100,000 primary votes in Michigan, home to the country’s largest population of Arab Americans, were cast for uncommitted.” For good reason, he did not conceal: “Some primary votes in Michigan, home to the country’s largest population of Arab Americans, were cast for uncommitted.”

If 100,000 and even 4500 rightly justify recounting actual sums as opposed to the minimizing and nonspecific “some,” doesn’t 697,100 which is the number of tons of food which have crossed into the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7 (79.16 percent of the total 881,736.5 total tons of humanitarian aid, per COGAT)?

Homepage graphic for this article is from COGAT.

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