Author of disputed Gaza famine report has lengthy history of anti-Israel statements

An author of a controversial report determining a famine has taken hold in parts of Gaza has a history of anti-Israel and pro-Iran rhetoric.

Andrew J. Seal helped to write Friday’s special snapshot, released by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the United Nations-aligned global food insecurity entity.

The IPC determined that all three established criteria—extreme lack of food, acute child malnutrition and mortality rates—had been met in Gaza City and surrounding neighbourhoods to affirm an ongoing famine in that region. Israeli authorities responded to the report, claiming it employed an irregular methodology and deliberately skewed data.

Seal is a senior lecturer at the University College London’s Institute for Global Health. On his X account, Seal opined that a genocide was taking place in Gaza, a mere 20 days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

A week after that, Seal intimated that the United States should withhold military aid from Israel.

“Israel has to be compelled to also agree (to an) immediate ceasefire, and realistic peace negotiations,” Seal wrote in a tweet with a graphic of a Congressional Research Service report on U.S. foreign aid to Israel. “One country holds the key!”

He also questioned, less than a month after Oct. 7, why Hamas should be removed from power, asking whether the terror group “Has to go because of extreme rhetoric and war crimes? Under that criteria, the Israeli government would also have to be removed. Not helpful.”

Seal’s rhetoric dates back well before the Israel-Hamas war. In 2018, Seal tweeted about the Nakba, which Palestinians label as the “catastrophe” of the Arab world’s failure to crush the Israeli state at birth. Seal termed the formation of Israel as “the failure of the British Mandate & destruction of the state of Palestine by Jewish insurgents.”

He also highlighted a 2021 report by the anti-Israel Human Rights Watch, which he said “pulls no punches as it describes the apartheid policies being implemented by Israel against the Palestinians.”

In July 2023, Seal promoted an Al Jazeera video glorifying Palestinian terror groups operating in Judea and Samaria as “a very interesting primer for understanding the escalating violent conflict between Palestinian groups and the Israeli state.”

Seal has also repeatedly posted content from Press TV, Iran’s foreign-language state television network, and Iranian officials. He echoed Iran’s contention of a “false flag” operation in a May 2019 incident in which four commercial ships were damaged in the Gulf of Oman.

Seal has also contended that Yemen’s Houthi rebels were attacking ships in the Red Sea in order to enforce an International Court of Justice ruling.

The tweets were uncovered by Eitan Fischberger, a writer and open-source intelligence investigator, as well as former AI researcher Mark Zlochin and Hillel Neuer, executive director of the UN Watch NGO.

Seal had not responded to a request for comment at time of publication.