Famine now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed monitor says
Famine is “now unfolding” in Gaza, with thousands of children malnourished and hunger-related deaths on the rise among the youngest, a UN-backed monitor has said in an alert.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said that airdrops over Gaza will not avert the “humanitarian catastrophe” unfolding across the territory.
“The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip,” said the UN-backed group of organisations, used as a monitor to gauge malnutrition.
“Immediate, unimpeded” humanitarian access into Gaza was the only way to stop rapidly rising “starvation and death”, it added.
The alert, which is not a formal designation of famine in Gaza, from the IPC said:
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths …
Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
Key events
German chancellor Friedrich Merz said that two of the country’s aircraft could fly aid airdrop missions from Jordan to Gaza as soon as Wednesday, calling the help a small but important signal.
“This work may only make a small contribution to humanitarian aid, but it sends an important signal: We are here, we are in the region,” said Merz at a press conference alongside Jordan’s King Abdullah in Berlin.
Two A400M aircraft were on their way to Jordan at the moment, where they would refuel and then fly their aid mission at the weekend at the latest, in coordination with France and Germany, said Merz.
Merz also welcomed initial steps taken by Israel to allow in aid but said more must follow.
Lisa O’Carroll
The European Commission has proposed partially suspending Israel from its flagship £80bn Horizon science research programme over what officials called a “severe” humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
It comes amid worldwide condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza including demands by Donald Trump that it must do more to stop the “real starvation”. On Tuesday, the leading international authority on food crises, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in Gaza.
Horizon Europe is among the most prestigious science research programmes in the world and has never suspended a country before. Officials believe, however, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is so severe that it now has a legal basis for suspension.
In its proposal to member states the commission reports that “90% of households face severe water insecurity and malnutrition rates are rising sharply” with “severe shortages of medicine” and “virtually the entire Gaza population … at risk of famine”.
Israel has denied that it is the cause of starvation, blaming it on other factors including the looting of aid by Hamas and distribution failures by the UN.
France will airdrop aid into Gaza ‘in coming days’, says diplomatic source
France will airdrop aid into Gaza “in coming days”, a diplomatic source has told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
“France will carry out airdrops in the coming days to meet the most essential and urgent needs of the civilian population in Gaza,” the source said as they urged for “an immediate opening by Israel of the land crossing points”.
Spain said yesterday that it would airdrop 12 tonnes of food into Gaza this week, in what will be another rare example of a European nation joining Middle Eastern countries (like Jordan and the UAE) in sending aid into the territory by air.
The UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, is set to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Gaza this afternoon.
The Labour government is under intense domestic pressure to take further action on Israel as UK public opinion hardens and pressure mounts on Starmer to at least (immediately) recognise Palestinian statehoood.
UK government sources have said that formal recognition of Palestinian statehood was a matter of “when, not if”. You can follow the latest developments in our UK politics live blog.
Death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza surpasses 60,000, says health ministry
At least 60,034 Palestinian people have been killed and 145,870 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
At least 113 Palestinian people were killed and 637 others injured in the last 24 hours alone, the ministry said, despite the Israeli military pause in parts of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza’s health ministry added in its Telegram post:
A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, as ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them until now.
‘Crumbs of aid won’t prevent human death at an unimaginable scale’, Oxfam warns
Oxfam has said the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative statement must “finally rouse the international community to act with a clarity and resolve that has so far been beyond it”.
Oxfam’s policy lead in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Bushra Khalidi, said:
Israel’s genocide has thrown Gaza into the final chaotic stages of a full-blown human catastrophe. Today’s warning of an unfolding famine – one created entirely by Israel’s murderous siege – must finally rouse the international community to act with a clarity and resolve that has so far been beyond it.
World leaders have been variously divided, complicit, uncaring, and collectively ineffectual in stopping Israel’s campaign of erasure. In failing to protect the Palestinian people, they have no more excuses left. Ending Israel’s genocide of Gaza is a test not only of our world order but of our collective humanity.
Air drops, and brief pauses for relative crumbs of aid, is nowhere near enough to prevent human death at an unimaginable scale. We need urgent forceful diplomacy and whatever restrictive measures are necessary in order to achieve an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, break Israel’s siege and allow humanitarian aid to flow freely and safely throughout Gaza. The hostages and unlawfully detained prisoners must be released.
My colleagues William Christou and Malak A Tantesh have written a useful explainer looking at how Israel’s ‘humanitarian pauses’ will affect Gaza’s starvation crisis caused by Israel’s restrictions on aid. Here is an extract from it:
Israel has announced airdropped aid will resume, which humanitarian organisations have said will provide a negligible amount of supplies. It also said that humanitarian corridors would be established to facilitate the entry of UN aid trucks into Gaza, though the number of trucks that will be allowed in was not specified.
NGOs say these steps may ease aid access, but with mass starvation already under way, far more is needed. In particular, humanitarian groups have called for a full ceasefire in order to get civilians the help they need.
“We have to go back to the levels we had during the ceasefire, 500-600 trucks of aid every day managed by the UN, including Unrwa, that our teams would distribute in 400 distribution points,” said Juliette Touma, the Unrwa director of communications.
She explained that aid agencies had previously walked Gaza back from the brink of starvation and that to do so again, an unimpeded flow of aid would be needed to “reverse the tide and trajectory of famine”.
Palestinian who helped make Oscar-winning No Other Land killed in West Bank
William Christou
Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been killed during an attack by Israeli settlers in the south Hebron hills.
The attack on Monday was captured on video, which appears to show an Israeli settler, Yinon Levi, who was put under sanctions by the US president, Joe Biden, then removed from the sanctions list by Donald Trump, firing his gun wildly at the time of the killing.
He was arrested later by Israeli police for questioning, though no charges have been filed against him.
The killing comes amid an increasing wave of settler and Israeli military violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 1,009 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in the West Bank since October 2023.
Accountability for settlers who commit acts of violence against Palestinians is rare.
According to activists from the village of Umm al-Khair in the West Bank, where the shooting took place, the killing happened after a settler in a bulldozer drove through their land, destroying trees and property.
Situation in Gaza unlike anything this century, says UN’s World Food Programme
The UN’s World Food Programme has warned that the disaster unfolding in Gaza is reminiscent of last century’s famines seen in Ethiopia and Biafra in Nigeria.
WFP emergency director Ross Smith told reporters in Geneva:
This is unlike anything we have seen in this century. It reminds us of previous disasters in Ethiopia or Biafra in the past century.
We need urgent action now.
The Dutch government has imposed travel bans on two far-right Israeli politicians, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, both central figures in Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.
They will no longer be allowed to enter the Netherlands, which accuses them of repeatedly inciting violence against Palestinian people and calling for an “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza strip.
Smotrich has approved the expansion of West Bank settlements and campaigned against humanitarian aid in Gaza, saying in May that he would allow “not even a grain of wheat” to enter the war zone.
He said on 6 May that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to … the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries”.
Ben-Gvir, a hardline Jewish settler from the occupied West Bank who has advocated for the deportation of all Arab citizens, has been an integral part of Netanyahu’s coalition since 2022, and has threatened to leave his side should the war in Gaza end.
Israel’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Modi Ephraim, will be summoned for a meeting with the Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp “to call on the Netanyahu government to change course,” and to “remind Israel to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law”.
The Dutch decision follows similar moves last month by Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, said Gaza has teetered on the brink of famine for two years, but recent developments have “dramatically worsened” the situation, including “increasingly stringent blockades” by Israel.
A formal famine declaration, which is rare, requires the kind of data that the lack of access to Gaza and mobility within has largely denied. The IPC has only declared famine a few times — in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region last year.
But independent experts say they don’t need a formal declaration to know what they’re seeing in Gaza.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine and executive director of the World Peace Foundation, said:
Just as a family physician can often diagnose a patient she’s familiar with based on visible symptoms without having to send samples to the lab and wait for results, so too we can interpret Gaza’s symptoms. This is famine.
What is the technical definition of famine?
Lizzy Davies
Lizzy Davies is the Guardian’s European news editor
In 2004, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization developed the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), as a tracking tool for global hunger. It has become the primary means of identifying famine, with a sliding scale from phase 1 (no or minimal food insecurity) to phase 5 (catastrophe or famine).
It defines a famine as an extreme deprivation of food where “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident”.
To meet the criteria, an area will have at least 20% of households facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people for every 10,000 a day dying “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease”.
If a number of households are experiencing famine conditions but not at the required level (20% of the population), or if local malnutrition or mortality levels have not reached the required thresholds for famine, those households will be put in the IPC phase-5 catastrophe category, even if the area as a whole is not in phase-5 famine.
Trump acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza and tells Israel to let in ‘every ounce of food’
Donald Trump on Monday told Israel to allow “every ounce of food” into Gaza as he acknowledged for the first time that there is “real starvation” in the region.
During a visit to Britain, the US president contradicted Benjamin Netanyahu after the Israeli prime minister claimed it was a “bold-faced lie” to say Israel was causing hunger in Gaza.
Trump is under increasing pressure to intervene in the humanitarian crisis, with dozens of Palestinians having died of hunger in recent weeks in a crisis attributed by the UN and other humanitarian organisations to Israel’s blockade of almost all aid into the territory…
The US president told reporters that Israel bore “a lot of responsibility” for the crisis in a rebuke to Netanyahu, who had claimed earlier on Monday that there was “no starvation in Gaza”.
Asked whether he agreed with this assessment, Trump said: “I don’t know. Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry.”
He later added: “We can save a lot of people, I mean some of those kids. That’s real starvation; I see it and you can’t fake that. So we’re going to be even more involved.”
Asked what he would ask Netanyahu for next time they spoke, Trump said: “We’re giving money and we’re giving food, but we’re over here … I want him to make sure they get the food. I want to make sure they get the food, every ounce of food.”
You can read the full report by my colleagues Eleni Courea and Libby Brook here:
Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday that hospitals in the Strip had recorded 14 new deaths in the past 24 hours due to famine and malnutrition.
This brought the total number of deaths due to malnutrition to 147, including 88 children, since the start of the war in 2023.
Famine now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed monitor says
Famine is “now unfolding” in Gaza, with thousands of children malnourished and hunger-related deaths on the rise among the youngest, a UN-backed monitor has said in an alert.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said that airdrops over Gaza will not avert the “humanitarian catastrophe” unfolding across the territory.
“The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip,” said the UN-backed group of organisations, used as a monitor to gauge malnutrition.
“Immediate, unimpeded” humanitarian access into Gaza was the only way to stop rapidly rising “starvation and death”, it added.
The alert, which is not a formal designation of famine in Gaza, from the IPC said:
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths …
Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
Israel imposed a total aid blockade for 11 weeks starting in March (ostensibly to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages), and the trickle of food, fuel and medical supplies allowed in since May has not relieved extreme hunger.
Israel has been widely accused of using food as a political weapon and of flagrantly breaking international law by collectively punishing the civilian population by its aid blockade.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel is not conducting a campaign of starvation in Gaza, calling the accusation “a bold faced lie”.
Responding to a global outcry provoked by reports and images of widespread starvation and malnutrition in Gaza, the Israeli military said on Sunday that it had began a “tactical pause” in the densely populated areas of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Muwasi to “increase the scale of humanitarian aid” into the strip.
It said the pause would be repeated every day from 10am to 8pm local time until further notice. Today is due to bring the third of these pauses.
Israeli attacks have continued across the territory, however, with Israeli forces having killed at least 92 Palestinians in Gaza on Monday, including 41 people seeking food, according to reports.
Using airdrops to deliver aid is ‘futile initiative that smacks of cynicism’, MSF says
We are continuing our live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza as international pressure on Israel to allow more aid into the territory continues to grow amid reports of widespread starvation and malnutrition.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has condemned the use of airdrops to deliver desperately needed aid to Gaza, calling the approach “futile” and “cynical”.
Jean Guy Vataux, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, called for Israel to allow for the full access of humanitarian aid that he says is ready to be delivered across the border by road.
He warned that airdrops are “notoriously ineffective and dangerous” as they can’t carry much aid and can injure (or even kill) people when they are dropped.
In a post on X, Vataux wrote:
Using airdrops for the delivery of humanitarian aid is a futile initiative that smacks of cynicism.
The roads are there, the trucks are there, the food and medicine are there, everything is ready to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza just a few kilometres away.
All that is needed is for Israeli authorities to decide to facilitate its arrival – expedite the clearance procedures, allow the entry of goods at scale, and coordinate to permit safe collection and delivery. Only then can we begin to resolve the starvation we are seeing …
At the moment, two million people are trapped in a tiny piece of land, which makes up just 12 per cent of the whole Strip – if anything lands in this area, people will inevitably be injured.
On the other hand, if the airdrops land in areas where Israel has issued displacement orders, people will be forced to enter militarised zones – once again risking their lives for food.
Israel says more than 200 aid trucks were collected and distributed yesterday by aid agencies, and that an additional 260 trucks entered Gaza and are awaiting collection.
This is in addition to airdrops carried out by Jordan, the UAE and Israel, which parachuted aid packages into the territory for the first time in months over the weekend. Charities say this aid is totally inadequate for the needs of Gaza’s population.
Stick with us as we give you the latest updates and analysis throughout the day.