Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United Nations is again warning of imminent famine in northern Gaza. A panel of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification committee (IPC) released an alarming report on Thursday. The IPC panel said that urgent steps must be taken by concerned countries to avert mass starvation “within days not weeks.”
Although U.S. television news has firmly swept Gaza under the rug, the campaign against its civilians of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ongoing. On Saturday morning, an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed 32 Palestinians, bring the death toll to 44 just in the early morning alone.
Some 70% of those killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been women and children, according to UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR). Counting confirmed deaths, the US said that Israeli forces killed eighty percent in residential buildings. CNN reports that OHCHR announced that it had found a consistent pattern of “high numbers of babies and young children, women, older persons, and families killed together in residential buildings.”
Regarding the famine, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted on “X”:
Deeply alarming — @theIPCinfo warns there is a strong likelihood that famine in northern #Gaza is imminent.
We call for an immediate scale-up and safe access for humanitarian aid — primarily food and medicines for severe malnutrition — within days not weeks. https://t.co/YZtdPs4RXk
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) November 8, 2024
The IPC panel report “classified the entire Gaza Strip in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency) acute food insecurity.”
Phase 4 is defined as follows: “At least 20 percent of households in an area are experiencing Phase 4 or worse outcomes, and acute malnutrition rates are expected to be between 15 and 30 percent.”
The panel report added, “One hundred and thirty-three thousand people were classified as facing catastrophic food insecurity.” That is the entire population of Pasadena, California.
Catastrophic food insecurity is defined as “Even when using all of their coping strategies, people have almost no food and cannot support their basic needs. Starvation, death and destitution are apparent.”
They say that a risk of famine exists for all of Gaza for the next five months, and the odds would rise with heavy fighting.
“Famine,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024.
The IPC panel observed, “On 6 October 2024, Israel designated all of the northern Gaza Strip as a combat zone and ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate.”
The panel cautions that the availability of food in the Gaza Strip must be understood in the context of a collapsed food system. The report says that aid shipments into Gaza were lower in October, 2024, than at any time since the conflict began over a year ago. The panel says that the World Food Program is reporting that the average daily number of trucks entering Gaza dropped to just 58, the lowest since November 2023. Before the war, as many as 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily — a necessity, since the Israeli government had blockaded the Strip.
And this low number of food shipments is being recorded at a time when severe food insecurity, escalating malnutrition, and the looming threat of famine were already evident in the northern governorates. The threat is especially potent in places where there is armed combat.
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