Gaza City and Surrounding Areas Officially Hit by Famine, Global Group Says

Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.

The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.

With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification,which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.

For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to get worse by the end of September, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine.

The group said in a report published on Friday that a combination of several factors had tipped Gaza from a hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people have been forced to flee for new shelters.

The report, which described the famine as man-made, said that it can be “halted and reversed.”

“The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading," the report said.

The Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries to Gaza rejected the group’s findings on Friday, saying that the experts had disregarded Israeli data on aid deliveries and overlooked Israel’s efforts over the last few weeks to bring more food into the territory, which it said had improved the situation. Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed after months of scarcity.

The agency, known as Cogat, criticized the experts for relying on what it called speculation and methodology it called questionable.

“The I.P.C. report is based on partial and unreliable sources,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the agency’s head, said in a statement, adding that it “blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts” led by Israel.

Deaths from hunger-related causes had already accelerated rapidly in Gaza this summer, the report said, well before the announcement on Friday.

But for the monitoring group to reach the conclusion that a famine is happening, it had to determine that Gaza meets three conditions: at least one in five households facing an extreme food shortage; a certain proportion of children acutely malnourished; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people dying each day, either from outright starvation or a combination of disease and malnutrition.

The group said that the proportion of Gaza households reporting very severe hunger had doubled from May to July. It had more than tripled in Gaza City.

Across Gaza, the number of acutely malnourished children has risen exponentially over the last three months, the group said. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, according to the United Nations.

A determination of famine from the hunger monitoring group is rare. Since its founding in 2004, the group has confirmed only three other famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and war-torn Sudan last year. More than 100,000 people died in Somalia before the official declaration of famine arrived.

In those cases, announcing a famine helped focus global attention on the crisis and galvanized donors.

There is already deep international outrage over starvation in Gaza. Images of hungry children, reports of aid workers, medical workers and journalists being too weak to do their jobs and increasingly urgent warnings from aid groups have shocked consciences worldwide.

Gaza also does not lack for donations. Aid agencies say they have enough supplies stockpiled just beyond the territory’s borders to feed its entire population for several months. What Gaza does not have, they say, are the permissions or the conditions required for aid groups to distribute those supplies inside Gaza.

“We are not facing a logistics, capacity or resource problem,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, an aid group operating in Gaza, said in a statement after the announcement on Friday. “What’s missing is not the ability to respond, but the political will to allow it. Failure to do so will cost countless additional lives.”

Israel says that the level of hunger in the enclave has been exaggerated, and that it is doing its best to lessen it. Israel’s military spokesman previously said there was no starvation in Gaza.

Israel first cut off aid to Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. Limited aid deliveries then resumed under a United Nations-run system.

Under global pressure, Israel has made concessions on its aid blockade, allowing in more food, water, medicine and other supplies. It has blamed the United Nations for not bringing in more food. But the organization and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays U.N. requests to pick up the supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.

Another major obstacle, they say, is that people in Gaza are so desperate to eat that they routinely wait along the aid convoys’ routes to grab whatever they can from the trucks. Most of the aid is taken this way, depriving people who cannot physically seek food from the trucks — including women, children, older people and the sick.

In March, Israel imposed another total siege in an effort to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages still in Gaza.

In May, Israel largely replaced the U.N. aid system by backing a new and much-criticized operation run mainly by American contractors. Israeli officials said it was the only way to ensure food did not fall into Hamas’s hands.

Since the new group began distributing food in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near its sites, according to Gazan officials and the U.N. human rights office. The Israeli military has said its troops have fired “warning shots” toward surging crowds and that it is investigating the episodes.

The New York Times reported in July that the Israeli military had never found proof that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations — a claim that Israel had frequently made to justify sidelining the U.N. aid system. Israeli officials said there was evidence that Hamas did take aid from other aid groups.

The hunger monitoring group has been warning for much of the war that Gaza was at high risk of famine. Aid officials have said that without a cease-fire allowing relief agencies to deliver large amounts of aid throughout Gaza safely and speedily, hunger and its complications will kill many more people there.

While Hamas has agreed to a new cease-fire proposal from mediators, Israeli forces are gearing up for a new offensive to take over Gaza City, the territory’s largest city and the heart of the area where famine was confirmed on Friday.

Troops were already massing on the city’s outskirts on Thursday, while Israeli officials were preparing to forcibly displace people to southern Gaza for what they said was their safety.

The displacement plans have drawn accusations from Palestinians and rights groups that Israel is pushing people from Gaza into something akin to a concentration camp.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.