The state of famine affecting the population in the north-central Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City, where the Israeli military are planning an imminent full-scale offensive, was officially established in a report published on Friday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, more often referred to as the IPC, an expert body that serves UN agencies, governments and NGOs in assessing food insecurity around the world.
The IPC’s report, authored by its Famine Review Committee, also forecast that famine will be declared in the governorates of Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the Gaza Strip, and Khan Younis, in the south, within “the coming weeks”.
“The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the report underlined. “There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. Any further delay – even by days – will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality.”
“If a ceasefire is not implemented to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip, and if essential food supplies, and basic health, nutrition, and WASH services [editor’s note, water, sanitation and hygiene] are not restored immediately, avoidable deaths will increase exponentially,” it warned.
The evaluation by the IPC’s ad hoc expert panel is established from information collected on the ground. Declaring a state of famine requires three precise criteria to be met. These are that 20% of households in the geographical area concerned are confronted with “an extreme lack of food”, when 30% of children among the same population are suffering from acute malnutrition, and when there are 2-4 non-trauma deaths per 10,000 people per day.
Since its creation in 2004, it is the first time that the IPC has declared a famine in the Middle East, and only the fifth time it has declared a famine in the world, after Somalia, South Sudan (declared twice) and Darfur (region of Sudan).
Speaking at a press conference in Geneva on Friday, when the IPC report was published, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and its emergency relief coordinator, said: “It is a famine that we could have prevented, if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.”
“The Gaza famine is the world’s famine,” he added. “It is a famine that asks ‘but what did you do?’ A famine that will and must haunt us all.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
UN agencies, along with international and local NGOs, have raised the alarm for months over the effects of the Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government, for its part, has consistently denied the existence of a risk of famine in the Palestinian territory, and still continues to, despite the IPC’s report and the accounts of humanitarian aid workers in the field.
Mediapart turned to Jérôme Grimaud, an emergency aid coordinator with the NGO Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), based in the Gaza Strip’s central Deir al-Balah governorate. Mediapart contacted him there on Friday after he had just returned from a three-day visit to the Gaza Governorate.
Mediapart: You have just spent three days in the north of Gaza, in the governorate of Gaza City, precisely there where the state of famine has been declared [by the IPC]. What did you see there?
Jérôme Grimaud: I had been absent from the Gaza Strip for a month and a half. On my return, a short time ago, I found my colleagues thinner, weakened, physically marked by the lack of [proper] access to food. I’m telling you about them because they are among the privileged – they receive a salary and so have access to the little amount of food there is. Even they cannot feed themselves properly.
Imagine the rest of the population. Up until the partial entry of trucks into the Gaza Strip three weeks ago, a third of Gazans ate only once every three days. Food security is defined by both the quantity and quality of available food. In Gaza today, agricultural land and the animal rearing sector have been destroyed. Notably, Gaza no longer produces vegetables, and everything that comes from outside is flour, starchy food, canned food. Also, when Gazans can access water, it’s demineralised water, because it’s very filtered to make it drinkable. So, even if people have a calory intake, and that’s the case of a minority, the qualitative intake – in proteins, vitamins, minerals – is almost nil. And that has been going on for months.
Mediapart: What effect does this inadequate dietary supply have on your patients?
J.C.: In those hospitals where MSF [Médecins sans Frontières] treats the injured and the burned, we have cases of wounds that don’t heal. Someone who is operated upon needs more calories in order to mend, whereas we can only supply one meal per day, without protein – rice with spices, pasta, starchy foods then, sometimes a little chick peas, but never red meat, nor chicken. So the wounds don’t heal.
That means, and readers should know about this, that they rot. The skin doesn’t reconstitute itself, so flies arrive there, lay eggs, and the maggots develop in the wounds. Not because we can’t treat them but because the patients don’t have enough necessary intake for wounds to heal. You smell it when you walk through the hospitals, there is this smell of putrefaction. As a consequence, it’s necessary to re-operate, if possible, or to amputate. There you have one of the consequences of famine, namely a lifelong handicap. And then, of course, there are people who die. More than two hundred since the beginning of the year, of whom almost half are children.
Mediapart: On the question of children, you have a nutrition programme in the Gaza Strip. Is it still functioning?
J.C.: In the Gaza strip, 40,000 children are enrolled in programmes [to deal with] severe malnutrition. For our part, we look after 1,600. That figure is five times more than in May. We cannot give them much. We’re getting to the end of our supplies of specifically nutritional food, provided for malnourished children, which we succeeded in getting in during the ceasefire [editor’s note, that lasted between January 19th and March 2nd 2025].
Moreover, this specific food doesn’t settle the problem because, once they have left, these children return to the same problems of access to food. So they come back.
There is no other solution than a massive arrival of food into the Gaza Strip. It must be inundated with food. We have proven, during the ceasefire, that with 600 trucks per day, and 400 aid distribution points spread across the whole territory, that we were able to cope. Then, there was no problem of malnutrition.
Mediapart: But trucks do today enter the Gaza strip.
J.C.: Today, out of the 12 border crossing points around the Gaza Strip, just three are open and allow trucks across. Those from the UN, which distributes aid freely, are systematically looted. The owners of commercial trucks, authorised [to cross into Gaza] since three weeks, are not in a mindset of free distribution, and only a tiny minority of the population can pay exorbitant prices for their food.
Of course, that allows the Israeli authorities to distribute photos showing stalls, for example of packets of crisps, in grocery stores. But apart from the very poor nutritional value of these products, who can buy them?
Mediapart: What is the specificity of this famine?
J.C.: This famine here is orchestrated. The state of Israel calculates the number of calories that will enter, and decides to strangle the Gaza Strip, or such and such a part of the Gaza Strip, according to its military and political objectives.
We’ve seen it in the north, with the sieges of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun, where hunger was used to push people out of these zones. We’ll probably this time see the same thing happening for Gaza City, there precisely where the state of famine has been declared, to force people to leave for the south. It is a war crime that will lead to another, the ethnic cleansing of a third of the territory, which accounts for half of the [Gazan] population.
The famine in Gaza is a weapon of war, and it is used not by warlords, but by the regular army of a liberal democracy which has the same institutional frameworks as ours. That should make all of us think.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse