Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.
The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification,which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.
For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to get worse by the end of September, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine.
The group said in a report published on Friday that a combination of several factors had tipped Gaza from a hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people have been forced to flee for new shelters.
The report, which described the famine as man-made, said that it can be “halted and reversed.”
“The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the report said.
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