Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said “full-scale hunger” exists in northern Gaza and is spreading to the south.
“What I can explain is that there's a famine in the North – full-scale famine – and it's moving south,” McCain told NBC's Kristen in an interview airing Sunday. told Mr. Welker.
Mr McCain said his comments were not an official declaration of famine, which must meet certain criteria, but were based on what WFP staff had seen and experienced in Gaza.
“It's horror,” she added.
It is the first time that the WFP chief has classified the situation in Gaza as famine, but the international organization has been dancing around the label for months as the famine in Gaza worsens. But as historian Jan Slobodkin wrote in Slate, whether the severe famine in Gaza is officially declared a famine is irrelevant from a humanitarian perspective.
Three points can help you make sense of the conversation. The first is that the criteria for declaring hunger are arbitrary. There is no clear line between when starvation is imminent and when starvation begins. The second point is that famine is best understood not as an event but as a process culminating in mass mortality. The third point is that declarations of famine are always contested.
Israel inflicted staggering levels of destruction and suffering in the Gaza Strip in retaliatory strikes after the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people. The IDF's relentless bombing campaign has destroyed farmland, critical infrastructure, and widespread housing in Gaza. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza, mostly women and children, and more than 10,000 are believed to be buried under rubble.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement this week that it could take up to three years to recover the bodies using the tools available.
As people in the Gaza Strip suffer from hunger, Israeli authorities continue to restrict the shipment of humanitarian aid and impose excessive waits at checkpoints for deliveries. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, accused Israel of using hunger as a “weapon of war.”
The humanitarian crisis is particularly acute in northern Gaza, where people rely on grass and animal feed to eat, NPR reports. At least 32 people died from malnutrition and dehydration in the north, 28 of them children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.