United Kingdom: The entire 2.3 million people living in Gaza are experiencing crisis levels of hunger, and the likelihood of famine is growing every day, according to a report supported by the UN.
A report released on Thursday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) cited that the percentage of households in Gaza experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity is the highest on record worldwide.
The report’s numbers show that the level of hunger in Gaza has surpassed even the recent near-famines in Afghanistan and Yemen.
“It doesn’t get any worse. I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza and at this speed – how quickly it has happened in just a matter of two months,” the World Food Programme’s chief economist, Mr. Arif Husain, said.
23 UN and nongovernmental organisations released a report stating that 576,600 people in Gaza are at catastrophic, or starvation, levels, and that the entire population is experiencing a food crisis.
“It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry. People are very, very close to large outbreaks of disease because their immune systems have become so weak because they don’t have enough nourishment,” Mr. Hussain remarked.
Every single person in Gaza is anticipated to experience severe food insecurity over the next six weeks, as per the report.
After four months of fighting, the 23 agencies predicted that by February 7, the entire population of the Gaza Strip would be at “crisis or worse” levels of hunger. Food insecurity is classified into five phases by the IPC: crisis is phase three, emergency is phase four, and famine or catastrophe is phase five.
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