The entire 2.3 million population of the Gaza Strip is facing crisis levels of hunger and the risk of famine is increasing each day as the Israel-Hamas war grinds on, a UN-backed body said in a report published yesterday.
That makes the proportion of households in the Palestinian enclave that are in hunger crisis, or suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, the largest ever recorded globally, the report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza has deteriorated rapidly since Israel began a major military operation on October 7, with heavy air strikes and a ground offensive laying waste to wide areas of the enclave since then, in response to a shock, deadly rampage into Israel by Gaza’s ruling Hamas group.
Trucks bringing aid from Egypt have delivered some food, water and medicine, but the United Nations says the quantity of food is just 10 per cent of what is needed for the territory’s inhabitants, most of whom have been displaced.
“There is a risk of famine and it is increasing each day that the current situation of intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persists or worsens,” the IPC report said.
Distribution of aid within Gaza has been hampered by military operations, inspections of aid demanded by Israel, communications blackouts and shortages of fuel.
Some desperate Gazans have jumped onto aid trucks to try to grab scarce supplies of food and other goods. There have been reports of residents eating donkey meat and emaciated patients seeking medical help.
“This report sort of confirms our worst fears,” said Arif Husain, chief economist and director of research at the UN World Food Programme, calling the crisis “unprecedented”.
“I’ve been doing this for the last 20 plus years. I’ve been to Afghanistan, I’ve been to Yemen, to Syria, South Sudan, Ethiopia, northeast Nigeria. But I’ve never seen something this bad happening this quickly,” he told Reuters in an interview.
The IPC, produced by a partnership including UN agencies and NGOs, sets the global standard for determining the severity of a food crisis using a complex set of technical criteria.
Crisis or Phase 3 levels of hunger mean households are suffering from high rates of acute malnutrition or can only meet minimum needs through crisis-coping strategies or using up essential assets, according to the IPC.
The IPC’s most extreme warning is Phase 5, which has two levels, catastrophe and famine.
At least one in four households – or 577,000 people – in Gaza are already facing catastrophic hunger, suffering from an extreme lack of food, starvation and exhaustion of coping capacities, the IPC found.
That is more than four times as many people as those estimated to be facing catastrophic hunger elsewhere in the world, Husain said.
“If the war continues the way it is, if the assistance is not coming in the way it should, we will be looking at a famine in the next six months,” Husain said of the situation in Gaza.
“Whether it happens in two months or whether it happens in three months, it’s anybody’s call.”
- The UAE foreign minister met a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official in Abu Dhabi where they discussed international efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza , the Emirati state news agency reported yesterday. Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan met Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Secretary General Hussein Sheikh to also discuss the humanitarian crisis in the coastal enclave.
Shaikh Abdullah stressed the importance of prioritising negotiations towards a framework for a two-state peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, WAM reported.
- The first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war have been the deadliest recorded for journalists, with the most journalists killed in a single year in one location, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said yesterday.
Most of the journalists and media workers killed in the war – 61 out of 68 – were Palestinian. The report said it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.”
Four Israeli and three Lebanese journalists, including Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah, were also killed between October 7 and December 20, CPJ data showed.
The group said it was further investigating the circumstances of all journalist deaths. It said such efforts in Gaza were hampered by widespread destruction and by the killing of journalists’ family members, who typically serve as sources for investigators looking into how the journalists died.
Reporting in Gaza has been severely restricted under intense Israeli bombardment, with repeated communications blackouts and a lack of food, fuel and housing, said CPJ, adding that foreign journalists have not been able to independently access the strip for most of the war.
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