The Gaza death toll is “already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” and “everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both—including every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage.” These are just a couple of the wildly exaggerated and demonstrably false claims made in an open letter signed by 99 American physicians, surgeons, and nurses who purport to have volunteered since the Hamas massacre last year.

Curiously, the authors felt the need to add a caveat when discussing Israeli hostages—“probably sick.” Apparently, while they are absolutely certain that every one of Gaza’s two million residents is on death’s door, the hostages who have been starved, tortured, and held underground for a year? Well, probably.

If one needed a clue as to how flimsy the claims in this letter are, they need only revisit an earlier version of the same letter published in July by many of the same signees. In that original letter, these trustworthy medical professionals warned that more than 60,000 people had died of starvation in the Strip since October 7, 2023.

Claiming that Israel has a “deliberate policy” of starving Gaza that was supposedly “not in dispute,” the signees cited a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) as their evidence. Yet, the IPC had already revised its earlier warning, finding no evidence of famine in Gaza. Naturally, it’s the earlier warning—the one the IPC itself said was wrong—that the authors chose to cite.