With half a million people starving, UN warns war is pushing Gaza to famine

More than half a million people in the Gaza Strip are starving due “woefully insufficient” quantities of food entering the territory since the outbreak of hostilities on October 7, according to a report by 23 United Nations and non-governmental agencies released on Thursday.

“It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry... one in every four people is starving in Gaza as we speak,’’ explained Arif Husain.

The World Food Program chief economist warned that if the Israel-Hamas war continued at the same levels and food deliveries were not restored, the population of the Palestinian territory could face famine within the next six months, accompanied by widespread outbreaks of disease.

The report found that Gaza's entire population of 2.2 million were in a food crisis or worse: 478,-thousand were at crisis levels, 1.17 million at emergency levels and 577-thousand at catastrophic levels, meaning starvation levels.

Food deliveries are grossly insufficient to Gaza, where two thirds of the population was reliant on humanitarian aid before Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas militants.

Before the interagency report, WFP food security experts had warned that people in Gaza had used up all of their resources, that bakeries had been destroyed and shops were empty, leaving people with no where to find food.