Natasha Hausdorff, a Zionist barrister specialising in international law, will be a keynote speaker at the Jewish National Fund Australia’s 2026 Annual Campaign in September.
Before she visits three cities, the public should be made aware of some of her most egregious statements.
Hausdorff told Jonathan Sacerdoti, a British Zionist broadcaster in “How the West’s own laws are being used to destroy it: Natasha Hausdorff exposes the ICC and UN”, that pro-Palestine activists’ use of photos of starving children is “emotion driven” (Timestamp 30:04).
“That’s why we’ve seen all these fake images of starving children,” she said. “I say fake because the context in which they’re presented is to suggest that Israel has starved them. And in every single instance, it has been proven that these are very ill children that have been unable to take in sufficient nutrition because of severe underlying health conditions, not because of shortages in the Gaza Strip …”
Sacerdoti, at times, interrupts to help her reframe her argument to sound more plausible.
“The other aspects of many of these images are, you know, family members that were very well fed being photographed alongside these kids sometimes being cut out, but I saw a number of mothers, you know, who were there holding these babies who looked not just well nourished, I mean one of them I recall had a double chin and I’ve never encountered a mother who would eat before her starving child.”
Hausdorff was propagating two lies about the famine in Gaza. The first is that the children “look starved” because they have underlying health conditions and not that Israel is starving them.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, described this assertion in August last year “as callous as it is inaccurate”.
The second lie is that babies are starving because their family members are eating before them. This claim is debunked by basic science and a knowledge about how famine impacts people.
Konyndyk wrote that in every famine he had witnessed “children succumbed first, while their parents hung on longer”, adding, “A skeletal child beside an exhausted but still-breathing parent is a hallmark of famine, not evidence against it.”
Alexandra Rutishauser-Perera, Director of Nutrition and Health at the NGO Action Against Hunger, told the Telegraph in August last year that because babies have less muscle than adults (as a percentage of their total body mass) they reach “starvation mode” sooner.
Carl Skau, The World Food Programme’s Acting Executive Director acknowledged in July that while there is “progress” with regards to food security in Gaza, “the overall humanitarian situation remains brutal: families lack water, sanitation and medicine”.
A recent survey by UNICEF found that stunting impacts 12.2%, or one in eight children under five in Gaza.
Hausdorff claimed in an opinion piece for the New York Post on June 21, titled “How Mayor Mamdani gets it wrong on international law and Israel”, that he ignores the “real apartheid in the region [Israel/Palestine]” and that “there is no apartheid system in the West Bank.
She said the New York city Mayor,was propagating “falsehoods” about: Israel being an “occupying power”, which was engaged in an “unlawful occupation” and that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are “illegal under international law”.
Hausdorff claimed Mamdani’s use of the term “apartheid” in relation to Israel “ignores the real apartheid in the region” which, in her view, is those areas “under Palestinian control” — Gaza and Areas A and B of the West Bank that, she said, are “Jew free”.
This does not reflect reality.
In the case of Areas A and B of the West Bank, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) prevent Jewish people from entering or leaving. In the case of Gaza, the Israeli state made the decision in 2005 to withdraw Israeli citizens from the territory, and the IDF evicted Jewish settlers who did not leave voluntarily.
The Palestinian Authority was not involved in making the decisions. Since Palestinians have/had no control over these areas, they cannot be committing apartheid.
The UN found in March 2022 that, since 1967, Israel has had “a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system, that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
Hausdorff has also accused Amnesty International (AI) of making false statements in its December 2024 report, You Feel like You are Subhuman, which alleges Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. She said that because AI relied on “local government authorities” to collect the data in Gaza, it meant that Hamas provided propaganda (timestamp 58:42).
But this is debunked by reading the report, which includes details on how AI collected its data. AI relied on fieldworkers to investigate incidents and conduct on-ground interviews. In addition, Hausdorff dismisses its methods to verify evidence from afar.
Hausdorff’s claim (timestamp1:30:56) that AI rewrote the definition of genocide to accuse Israel of undertaking it have been rejected by at last three international lawyers, who spoke with The Journal — Mike Becker, assistant professor of international human rights law at Trinity College, Dublin; Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict; and Dirk Moses, a professor of political science at the City University of New York and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research — as well as by the case bought by South Africa, currently before the International Court of Justice in which Israel stands accused of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.
If you value the truth and accountability, do not let Hausdorff perpetrate her lies when she arrives in Australia.
[Rosie Foster is an activist based in Western Australia.]