The organization made up of United Nations agencies and other non-profit groups also announced 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people faces food insecurity.
Israel’s siege in Gaza has devastated swathes of the territory, diminished food, fuel and water supplies, and crushed the enclave’s medical system.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, also said Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system, in a post on X on Monday.
“It’s unprecedented to make an entire civilian population go hungry this completely & quickly. Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system. Israel is intentionally imposing a high rate of disease, prolonged malnutrition, dehydration + starvation by destroying civilian infrastructure,” Fakhri added.
The United Nations has repeatedly reiterated that Gaza is grappling with catastrophic hunger and nearly half of the population is at a risk of famine, calling for an urgent scaling up of aid. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has recently sounded the alarm on the dire humanitarian crisis in the besieged strip, lamenting that four out of “five of the hungriest people anywhere in the world are” in the coastal territory.
Since a cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israel has continued relentless attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 25,000 Palestinians and injuring many more, according to local health authorities.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed, and nearly 2.3 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
Last week, Martin Griffiths, the man in charge of the UN’s relief operations in Gaza, painted a dire picture of conditions in the besieged strip, saying his colleagues have witnessed “scenes of utter horror”.
“Corpses left lying in the road. People with evident signs of starvation stopping trucks in search of anything they can get to survive,” Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told members of the UN Security Council.
Griffiths stated many people no longer had homes to return to, with shelters in the enclave housing far more people than they could cope with.
Food and water was running out and the risk of famine was growing by the day, he added.
The health system, he said, was “in a state of collapse,” where women were unable to give birth safely, children could not get vaccinated, infectious diseases were on the rise and people had been seeking shelter in hospital yards.
In a stinging criticism, Griffiths added his team’s efforts to send humanitarian convoys to the north have been met with delays and denials amid impossible conditions, with the safety of aid workers being put in danger.
“Orders for evacuation are unrelenting. As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety,” Griffiths said of Israel’s evacuation policies.
“There is no safe place in Gaza. Dignified human life is a near impossibility,” he continued.
