Famine may already be happening in northern Gaza and 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 dire situation with more than half the population of Gaza — 1.1 million people — facing catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation.
Compared to the IPC’s previous analysis in December 2023, acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip has deepened and widened, with nearly double the number of people projected to experience those conditions by July.
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 experiencing crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity — none of the population currently falls into the worst tier of catastrophic food shortages, Bechdol said.
People in areas designated at Tier 5 are considered to be “starving” and facing a significantly increased risk of acute malnutrition and death.
Read more here from The Washington Post.
