The risk of starvation will continue throughout the Gaza Strip this winter unless the fighting stops and more humanitarian aid reaches families, SIR (Servizio Informazione Religiosa) reported ), citing a World Food Program (WFP) assessment.
The UN World Hunger Organization warns that the humanitarian situation in the strip remains catastrophic and hundreds of thousands of people will starve in the coming months.
Twelve months of fighting have destroyed livelihoods, drastically reduced food production and severely restricted both commercial and humanitarian supply lines, the report said.
The Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) phase predicts that 1.95 million people in Gaza (91 percent of the population) will face acute food insecurity (IPC phase 3 or worse) in the coming months. And 345,000 people will face catastrophic levels of hunger (IPC phase 5).
In winter, a large part of the population of the Strip will suffer from acute malnutrition, and there is no prospect of Israeli attacks on the civilian population stopping.
No humanitarian food supplies have entered northern Gaza in the first two weeks of October, and only a few trucks have reached the southern and central areas, meaning the situation is likely to be much worse than estimated. Without safe and sustainable access, WFP cannot deliver life-saving humanitarian assistance at the scale needed.