A senior United Nations official said Monday’s hunger report in Gaza is “extremely concerning” given that the strip’s roughly 2 million population continues to face “a very critical risk of famine.”
Beth Bechdol, deputy director of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said Gaza’s food system has collapsed since Israel reimposed its blockade.
“We are moving into a period where the entire population of the Gaza Strip ... are continuing to face a very critical risk of famine and extreme hunger and malnutrition,” she said in an interview.
Mahmoud Alsaqqa, food security coordinator for the charity Oxfam, meanwhile, slammed Israel’s blockade, saying that thousands of aid trucks carrying aid were prevented from reaching desperate civilians.
“Gaza’s starvation is not incidental—it is deliberate, entirely engineered,” he said. “It is unconscionable and is being allowed to happen.”
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises, said outright famine is the most likely scenario unless conditions change.
Nearly half a million Palestinians are in “catastrophic” levels of hunger, meaning they face possible starvation, the report said, while another million are at “emergency” levels of hunger.
