Last week, in a piece for the Guardian, Nick Maynard, a volunteer surgeon at a hospital in southern Gaza, wrote, “I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her.” The humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was already dire, deteriorated even further in July, with sixty-three people, including twenty-five children, dying from malnutrition-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. This past weekend, Israel announced that it would pause some military activity in the territory and allow more aid in, although it remains unclear how long that pause will last.

As more reports and images of emaciated children emerge from Gaza, close Israeli allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, have issued harsh critiques, calling the current humanitarian situation a “catastrophe.” Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced that his country would become the first member of the G-7 to recognize a Palestinian state, and Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has also promised to do so unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire. On Monday, even President Trump acknowledged that children were going hungry. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has continued to insist that there is “no starvation in Gaza.”) Two Israeli human-rights groups have begun referring to Israel’s actions as “genocide.” The scale of the crisis has also caused a number of American politicians and commentators, including defenders of the war, to argue that more aid needs to be allowed into the territory, or that the war itself has become unjust.

Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12, is widely considered one of the country’s most influential journalists. Segal is a prominent defender of the Netanyahu government. He has written on topics such as what he calls “The Settler Violence Scam” and the need to annex parts of Gaza. Last week, he wrote a piece for the Free Press in which he said that “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis.” He approvingly quoted the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who said, “It’s hard to convince Israelis of that because literally everything said to them for 22 months on this topic has been a fiction.” He also wrote that without Hamas’s “gleeful hoarding of food,” Gaza “would not be facing the current food shortage.” (The following day, Reuters reported that an analysis conducted by U.S.A.I.D. found “no evidence of systematic theft” of U.S. humanitarian supplies by Hamas. Another report, in the Times, said that Israeli officials privately agree that Hamas has not systemically looted United Nations aid, directly contradicting a central talking point of the Israeli war effort.)

I recently spoke by phone with Segal. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his wavering opinion on whether there is hunger in Gaza, his support for Trump’s plan to develop Gaza without Palestinians, and just how much power the extreme right has over the Israeli government.

For Americans who might not know your work, you’re often talked about as someone who’s very familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking. Are you in touch with—

Yeah, that’s correct. I’m not the mouthpiece of Netanyahu. I’m a right-winger, but not more than this. I speak only for myself.

I just meant that people say that you understand his thinking and have good sources in the government.

I wouldn’t deny it. Yes.

So tell me what caused you to write this piece for the Free Press saying that there was grave concern about the food situation in Gaza.

So, first of all, I don’t think there is hunger in Gaza. I want to put that first and foremost.

You do not think there is hunger in Gaza?

I don’t think that the hunger campaign that Hamas runs in the international media is anything remotely connected to the truth. However, I do think there is a situation that can actually deteriorate to something like this. For the past twenty-two months, Hamas has been running a hunger campaign in Gaza. Israelis and maybe some Americans are wary of these accusations because they know it’s propaganda. The fact that there is a developing crisis does not emanate from Israeli decisions, but from a cynical game played by Hamas and the United Nations. However, Israel will be blamed for it. That’s why I want Israel to be wise and not only to be just.

Just to be clear, your article does talk about a “hunger crisis” in Gaza.

Developing. Developing. [The piece is titled “The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Crisis in Gaza.”]

There are reports of starvation deaths in Gaza. Are you denying those?

I doubt ninety per cent of it. I can’t tell you that it doesn’t exist in specific places or specific people, but I don’t think that the numbers Hamas and the international media quote are the numbers.

One of the things your piece says is that, essentially for the entire duration of the war, there’ve been false warnings about a hunger crisis. Why do you think the warnings were false previously?

Hamas tried to depict a picture that did not exist. There was no hunger in Gaza. For years, Hamas has claimed that Gaza is starving. Hamas always used this weapon of alleged hunger in order to get more humanitarian aid. [A U.N. study from 2022, prior to the war, found that more than three-quarters of Palestinian families reduced the number of meals they consumed because of a lack of food.]

The Times reported that “at least 20 Palestinian children had died from malnutrition and dehydration.” So we’re not denying that people have died, right?

No, we do not deny that people died. We just are not sure that people died from dehydration or starvation.

That report I just quoted was from March of 2024.

I see. I beg to differ with the New York Times because the New York Times bases its reports on Hamas sources. The New York Times relies heavily on stringers in Gaza that have two options: either report what Hamas wants or die, and I blame the New York Times for this. The head of the legal department of the New York Times told me, How can you blame us for writing what Hamas wants? Our journalists died because in the past they reported things that Hamas didn’t like.

This person told you this on the record?

They wanted to sue me when I claimed that they relied on stringers who collaborated with Hamas.

So they told you this privately?

Yeah. You can quote it. [David McCraw, the lead newsroom lawyer at the Times, was identified to me later by Segal as the person who allegedly said this. McCraw told The New Yorker, “I never said any of that. We never threatened to sue him. And our journalists have not been killed by Hamas.” In 2023, McCraw asked Segal to make corrections to some statements he had made on social media, including that the Times employed “ISIS-embedded stringers.”] So even if we take into account the fact that twenty children died of dehydration, which I doubt and which the I.D.F. doubts, there is no way to double-check it. [In the past several days, a number of news organizations have called on Israel to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, something that it has thus far largely restricted them from doing.] What can make hunger in Gaza is the unholy coalition between the U.N. and Hamas. Each and every organization in Gaza has to pay at least fifteen to twenty per cent of the humanitarian aid directly to the pockets of Hamas.