International agencies have ramped up efforts to distribute food to displaced residents in Gaza amid ongoing Israeli strikes in the territory. Footage filmed by the World Food Program showed food being distributed in Rafah, including at a recently re-opened bakery.
WFP Palestine Country Director Samer Abdeljaber said his organization has reached “around 1.4 million people with food.”
He did stress however that “everyone in Gaza is hungry.”
The organization said its Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification (IPC) report showed that there were “devastating levels of food insecurity in Gaza.”
“It confirms that the entire population of Gaza – roughly 2.2 million people – are in crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity (phases 3-5),” the organization said.
The release of the report came as the death toll in Gaza from the ongoing war surpassed 24,000, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, sparked by the militant group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, has prompted unprecedented destruction in the tiny coastal enclave and triggered a humanitarian catastrophe that has displaced most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population and pushed more than a quarter into starvation, according to the UN.
It has also stoked regional tensions, with Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen carrying out strikes in support of the Palestinians.
