People in Gaza are so malnourished that they could face famine, and life in overcrowded makeshift camps because of a prolonged Israeli military offensive has made them even more vulnerable, according to a report by experts released on Thursday.
The hunger emergency affects nearly all of Gaza’s population of around 2.2 million, but it is worst for people in the north of the enclave, where Israeli forces have intensified operations this month, according to the report, by the United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative. It added that many Gazan children under 5 were acutely malnourished.
Since the conflict began more than a year ago, reports by the panel — which is made up of U.N. agencies and international relief groups — have measured the scope of the hunger crisis in Gaza.
Its report in March projected that famine in Gaza was “imminent.” And even though conditions improved from May to August because of a surge of humanitarian assistance, according to excerpts from the report released on Thursday, those gains have been largely reversed over the last two months. The full report is scheduled for release next week, officials said.
“Catastrophic acute food insecurity and concerning acute malnutrition levels will continue to prevail if the conflict continues, and humanitarian activities are restricted,” the report said. Israel has ordered people to evacuate large parts of north Gaza, and these “orders have significantly disrupted humanitarian operations,” the report said.
“Repeated displacements have steadily worn-down people’s ability to cope and access food, water and medicine, deepening the vulnerability of entire communities,” it said.
The I.P.C. said that almost all of Gaza faced high levels of acute food insecurity, and it put the enclave at Phase 3 on its five-level classification scale. It said that about 133,000 people faced a catastrophic lack of food, which is Phase 5.
A famine, as defined by the I.P.C., occurs when three conditions are met: At least 20 percent of households have an extreme lack of food; at least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and at least two adults, or four children, for every 10,000 people die daily from starvation or from disease linked to malnutrition.
In practice, however, many civilians have been dealing with a constant lack of food since the conflict began.
Mohammad al-Masri, a 32-year-old accountant who lives with 22 family members in Al-Mawasi, a coastal village that Israel had declared a humanitarian safe zone, said on Thursday he saw aid dropped by a plane in the distance, but he was unable to reach it because it fell too far away.
He said in a telephone interview that for breakfast the family had eaten crushed red peppers and bread, made from flour infested with worms and bugs, purchased in the market at an inflated rate.
“The food situation is a catastrophe,” he said, adding that he had had diarrhea for two weeks. “Food is not available in the markets and if it is, the price is too high for anyone to be able to buy it.”
The report projected that the number of people in Gaza classified as being in Phase 5 would double in the coming months, and that more than 41 percent of the enclave’s population would be in Phase 4, the “emergency” phase, over that period.
Before the war, Gaza had relatively low rates of malnutrition. The I.P.C.’s experts, who have declared that famine conditions have been met twice since 2004, said they were surprised by the rapid onset of the crisis. While there are fewer people overall facing famine than in crises in parts of Somalia in 2011 and parts of South Sudan in 2017, the percentage of Gaza’s population in need is much higher, said Arif Husain, the chief economist for the World Food Program.
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