U.N. calls for ‘unfettered’ aid to Gaza amid report of imminent famine

Famine may already be happening in northern Gaza, and it risks spreading across the besieged enclave, plunging 2.2 million Palestinians into the broadest and most severe food crisis in the world, the globe’s leading body on food emergencies said Monday.

The new report from a cluster of international organizations and charities known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC, outlined a devastating situation with up to half the population of Gaza ― 1.1 million people ― facing catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation between now and July. The most immediately affected areas are in the northern regions, which Israeli forces cut off from the enclave’s southern half and which only a trickle of aid has been able to enter.

Compared with the IPC’s previous analysis in December, acute food insecurity in the Gaza strip has deepened and widened, with nearly twice as many people projected to suffer those conditions by July. The most dire projection is based on an escalation of the conflict, including a ground offensive in Rafah.

In the IPC’s five-tier classification of food crises, Gaza now has the largest percentage of a population to receive its most severe rating since the body began reporting in 2004, Beth Bechdol, deputy director general at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told The Washington Post.

By comparison, today in Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan ― where millions are suffering crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity ― none of the population falls into the worst tier of catastrophic food shortages, Bechdol said.

People in areas designated at Phase 5 are considered to be “starving” and facing a significantly increased risk of acute malnutrition and death.

“So, for Gaza to have 1.1 million people in IPC 5 is unprecedented,” she said. She added: “This is 100% a man-made crisis. There’s no hurricane, there’s no cyclone, there’s no 100-year flood. There’s no protracted year-on-year drought.”

The report is likely to add fuel to the increasingly sharp criticism of Israel from governments in the United States and Europe about the grim dimensions of the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On Monday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, repeated his assertion that Israel was using starvation as a “weapon of war.” He noted that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “we cannot stand by and watch Palestinians starve.”

“In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine; we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people,” Borrell said at the start of a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza in Brussels. “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war.”

Moamen al-Harthani, a 29-year-old resident of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya, described how people in the north were eating weeds and other plants to survive.

“There is no rice, no sugar, no beans, no lentils. … No fruit or vegetables,” Harthani said. “People eat the food of animals and livestock,” he said. Unable to find or afford flour, Harthani makes a bread-like substitute out of animal feed.

The IPC, an international initiative to classify food insecurity and malnutrition and assesses conditions, does not issue an official declaration of famine ― a move left to senior local authorities or the highest United Nations official in an affected area. A famine designation would elevate the crisis to a major talking point at the U.N. Security Council and compel high-level crisis talks among humanitarian bodies and groups.

Hamas has been using the word “famine” in its official statements for months. Hamas spokesperson Basem Naim said he did not expect to issue “a new specific and official announcement about determining the beginning or end of the famine.”

On Monday, Israeli authorities denied Philippe Lazzarini, the chief of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), entry into Gaza, he said. “My visit today was supposed to coordinate and improve the humanitarian response,” Lazzarini said, sharing the IPC famine projection. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian aid group serving Gaza but has come under attack from Israel over allegations that a handful of its staff were involved in the Oct 7. attack.

Also on Monday, a Famine Review Committee made up of leading independent international food security, nutrition and mortality experts issued a conclusion that the IPC’s findings were “plausible” and warned that famine in northern Gaza “is now projected and imminent.” It noted that famine conditions for acute food insecurity and malnutrition had already been surpassed, though it said it was unclear if child mortality and non-trauma death rate thresholds had been reached.

A famine in Gaza would follow one that afflicted 80,000 people in South Sudan in 2017 and 490,000 people in Somalia in 2011.

“This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system ― anywhere, anytime,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday.

The war has destroyed and upended all parts of Gaza’s food system ― from the fruits, vegetables, livestock and fish raised on farms to the bakeries and factories that produced breads and dairy products. The percentage of damaged agriculture land increased from 25 percent to 60 percent between November and January, the report said. It noted that more than 300 barns, 100 agricultural warehouses, 46 farm storage facilities, 119 animal shelters, 200 farms, as well over 600 wells used for irrigation have been destroyed, while most livestock has been abandoned, slaughtered or sold.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims typically have an early-morning, pre-fast bite and then a large meal when fasting ends after sundown. But this year, Gazans told The Post, they are fasting regardless of Ramadan. Since the war began, Harthani said, he has lost around 60 pounds.

Harthani’s wife and 6-week-old child relocated south to Rafah, where they thought it would be safer. But in Rafah, his wife is similarly going hungry, as she can’t afford sufficient food and formula due to sky-high wartime inflation, he said.

Both mother and newborn are weak from malnutrition. His wife recently developed liver disease, Harthani said.

The latest analysis was conducted remotely between Feb. 26 and March 1, by more than 40 experts from 18 agencies, the IPC said. But the new assessment — the IPC’s grimmest to date ― suggests that northern Gaza is either already in the grip of famine or could reach that point by May.