FEWS NET has been releasing updates on the situation in the Palestinian enclave monthly since October. The latest issue stressed that “Israel’s near-total blockade of humanitarian and commercial food supplies to besieged areas of North Gaza Governorate” has been a major factor contributing to food scarcity in the area.

The report cited an estimate by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which said that as of mid-November some 65,000-75,000 people remained in the area. The figure was what triggered a negative reaction from Ambassador Jack Lew, Washington’s envoy to Israel, who called the data “outdated and inaccurate” and its mention by FEWS NET “irresponsible”.

The US diplomat estimated the current civilian population in Northern Gaza at between 7,000 and 15,000 people and cited similar ranges reported by other sources, including the Israeli military.

FEWS NET took down its report hours after publication, but an archived version remains available online. No amended variant was published on its website at the time of the writing.

Some critics of Israel have argued that Lew’s intervention de facto acknowledged that Tel Aviv is succeeding in a campaign to depopulate Northern Gaza and that Washington is supporting that outcome.

“The US government is boasting of its success in committing crimes against humanity,” US journalist Ben Norton remarked, commenting on the ambassador’s statement.

The Israeli government has been accused of trying to make Gaza uninhabitable by destroying the enclave’s civilian infrastructure and subjecting its people to malnutrition.

The ongoing humanitarian crisis was triggered by military action, which the Israeli armed forces launched in October of last year in response to the deadly attack into Southern Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.

South Africa has filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of pursuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The UN’s top court ruled in late January that the claim was plausible enough for it to order an injunction while it reviews the merits of the case.

Israeli soldiers have murdered at least 723 policemen and aid security personnel guarding aid shipments in the besieged territory since October 2023, according to the latest statistics published by the Gaza media office.

It said that armed gangs are fully protected by Israeli forces “to loot the humanitarian aid as part of a deliberate starvation strategy imposed as collective punishment on Gaza’s civilian population”.

“We condemn in the strongest terms the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation,” it said.

“We call on the international community, the United Nations, and human rights and humanitarian organizations to intervene urgently and pressure the Israeli occupation to ensure the flow of aid without any obstacles.”

The United Nation’s most senior human rights official, Volker Turk, has stated in a previous statement that there was a “plausible” case that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

The charity group Oxfam reported on Saturday that only 12 trucks were able to distribute aid to northern Gaza in the past two and a half months, amid Israel’s “deliberate delays and systematic obstructions.”

The group added that the aid distributed by three of the trucks was destroyed by the Israeli forces.

“For three of these, once the food and water had been delivered to the school where people were sheltering, it was then cleared and shelled within hours.”

Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid for the North Gaza governorate have escalated since October when it imposed a siege on the area.

In late November, judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the regime’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that there were “reasonable grounds” he bore “criminal responsibility” for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.