NEW YORK CITY: Gaza is facing a catastrophic hunger crisis, with food insecurity and malnutrition reaching levels that meet the official thresholds for famine, UN agencies warned on Tuesday.
An alert from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a system for determining the scale and nature of a food crisis, said that two of the three official indicators used to determine famine conditions are now present in parts of the Gaza Strip.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and UNICEF warned that time is rapidly running out to launch a full-scale humanitarian response.
“Gaza is now on the brink of a full-scale famine,” said the FAO’s director-general, Qu Dongyu.
“People are starving not because food is unavailable but because access is blocked, food systems have collapsed, and families cannot survive. The right to food is a basic human right.”
