Gaza strip: famous in the north area

A famine has been explained in a northern area of ​​the Gaza Strip. The necessary criteria were fulfilled, the responsible IPC initiative (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) said.

It is about the Gaza region, in which the city of the same name is located. The life of 132,000 children under the age of five was threatened because of malnutrition, the initiative said. 41,000 of them would be regarded as particularly threatening cases, twice as many as in the previous assessment in May. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is the first time that a famine is called out in a country of the Middle East.

“An immediate ceasefire and the end of the conflict are of crucial importance in order to enable an unimpeded, large -scale humanitarian aid to rescue human life,” said the initiative.

Israel rejected the IPC publication. “There is no famine in Gaza,” wrote the Israeli Foreign Ministry on the platform X. The assessment of the responsible IPC initiative (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) was based on the false information of Hamas. In the past few weeks, aid deliveries have “flooded the Gaza Strip with basic foods”.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli authority Cogat responsible for Palestinian affairs also spoke of amended criteria of the IPC. “The report deliberately ignores data that the authors were presented to in a meeting before its publication and overlooks the efforts to be stabilized in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks,” said Cogat.

What information was presented to the authors remained open. “This not only affects the IPC report, but also serves the Hamas propaganda campaign.” The authority rejected “the assertion of a famine in the Gaza Strip and especially in the city of Gaza.”

Before a famine is explained, three criteria must be met: at least 20 percent of households are affected by an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 inhabitants die from hunger or due to the interaction of malnutrition and illness. All three are true, as Jean-Martin Bauer from the World Food Program (WFP) said in a briefing for journalists in Geneva.

The IPC initiative was founded in 2004. Members are almost two dozen organizations of the United Nations and aid organizations. It is responsible for the assessment of hunger layers all over the world. In the IPC scale there are five levels of the nutritional situation in a country or region. The highest – and worst – is level five: “disaster/famine”. Below is about hunger crises. So far, level four (“Emergency/Emergency”) has been true for the entire Gaza strip.

According to the IPC, four famines have been confirmed in the past 15 years: 2011 in Somalia, 2017 and 2020 in South Sudan and most recently in Sudan in 2024.