WORST-CASE SCENARIO OF FAMINE HITS GAZA
By Our Foreign Correspondent
The “worst-case scenario of famine” is unfolding in the Gaza Strip under Israel’s assault, UN-backed food security experts said on Tuesday, in a call to action amid unrelenting conflict, mass displacement and the near-total collapse of essential services in the war-battered enclave.
As of today, the total number of Palestinians killed since Israel launched its offensive passed 60,000, according to the health ministry in the enclave.
“Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, said in its alert. The IPC emphasized that its warning constituted an alert and was not a formal “famine classification.” The dire hunger crises being experienced by the people of Gaza may have its consequences reverberate across generations.
Roughly a third of the 2.1 million people in Gaza have gone multiple days in a row without food, and a quarter of the population is experiencing “famine-like conditions,” Ross Smith, the director of emergency preparedness and response at the U.N. World Food Programme, told reporters last week. “The hunger crisis in Gaza has sort of reached new and astonishing levels of desperation,” he said.
