Another Blood Libel: Palestinian kids' Anemia the fault of Zionists

As usual, a little investigation into the accusations thus published by unquestioning media and received by unsuspecting readers, reveals their falsehood.

From Ami Isseroff:

The following accusation appeared in a letter to Barack Obama circulated on many Web logs and Web sites, as well as by World Vision and other charities:

Last April, UNICEF reported that more than 50% of children under five in Gaza are anemic...(one of many sources on the Web: pjoris.blogspot.com/2009/02/to-president-obama-re-gaza.html)

Another report from 2008 gives a similar estimate of anemia in Gaza:

A Palestinian human rights commission has warned that 46% of Gaza children were suffering from anemia due to their parents' inability to feed them properly as a result of the brutal siege imposed on Gaza by the Israeli occupation government, which deprived those parents of work. (cited here)

[--]

And what about the claim that UNICEF found in April 2008 that half the children in Gaza are anemic because of the Israeli "siege"?

What UNICEF actually claims in its report of April 4, 2008 is this:

Infant and under five mortality rates have seen little changes since 2000...Iron deficiency anemia affects more than 50 per cent of under-fives.

As suggested by the other data, UNICEF notes that the situation is unchanged since 2000. The anemia and infant mortality are not due to anything that Israel did in the last two years.

In fact, the one year infant mortality rate in Gaza has evidently gone down steadily. It is now listed as about 20 per thousand live births for males, compared, for example, to 27 per thousand in Syria, 30 per thousand in Egypt and 40 per thousand in Turkey.

Read the whole thing, here