GENEVA: The population of the Gaza Strip faces an increasing risk of famine as the Israel-Hamas war drags on, the UN’s World Food Programme warned Tuesday.
“The situation in Gaza is of course slipping every day into a much more catastrophic situation,” with “a looming threat of famine”, Abeer Etefa, the WFP’s senior Middle East spokeswoman told a press briefing.
A study conducted between November 24 and December 7 found that all 2.2 million people in the Palestinian territory were in a crisis level of food insecurity.
The picture has deteriorated since, said Etefa, speaking by video link froom Cairo.
“More than half a million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic food insecurity levels and the risk of famine increases each day.”
Etefa said that even with the long years of conflict in places like Syria, Yemen and Sudan, “we haven’t seen that high a level of the number of people in these conditions in such a short span of time”.
She recalled that Gaza now has “the largest concentration of people in what looks like famine-like conditions anywhere in the world”.
The Gaza war broke out with Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attacks, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s relentless offensive in response has killed at least 25,490 people in Gaza, around 70 percent of them women, children and adolescents, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Etefa said about 70 percent of WFP requests to deliver food to northern Gaza were rejected by the Israeli authorities.
The last deliveries to the north were around January 11 and 13, carrying 200 tonnes of food for 15,000 people in Gaza City. “That’s really very, very small numbers,” Etefa said.
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