7/26/2025–|Last update: 19:41 (Mecca time)
Although the United Nations and a number of NGOs continue to warn it of the danger of an imminent and generalized famine in the Gaza Strip, the famine can only be announced according to specific criteria based on scientific evidence.
It is currently impossible to collect these evidence for several reasons, most notably the difficulty of entering the sector or even moving in it in light of the tight Israeli siege.
What is the famine?
The term “famine” has been known since 2004 by accurate and strict standards based on an index for measuring food security known as the “Integrated Food Security Classification” IPC (IPC) and is based on international scientific standards.
Famine is the fifth and most severe stage of this scale (IPC5), and is characterized by “extreme deprivation of food”.
Famine occurs in a specific area when 3 thresholds reach, and when 20% of families face a severe lack of food, 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two adults die out of every 10,000 per day “as a direct result of hunger or the interaction between malnutrition and disease.”
And when these criteria are achieved, it belongs to the concerned authorities in the country, such as governments and United Nations agencies, to announce the state of starvation.
What is the situation in Gaza?
“We cannot make investigations that allow us to officially describe the starvation,” the emergency coordinator at MSF, Amand Bazirol, adding, adding, “It is impossible for us to inspect the population to take their sizes and evaluate the weight rate to length, etc.”
For his part, the Middle East official in the “Work against Hunger”, Jean -Rafael Boato, said that “what is complicated largely all these continuous moves (the forced population displaced with the Israeli army issuing instructions to evacuate), and it was not possible to go to the north of the (Gaza Strip) as well as to many places where the most vulnerable population” for food lack.
“We have faced difficulties in the data and access to information,” Nabil Tabal, from the World Health Organization.
The available few indicators paint a disturbing image of the food situation in the sector, at a time when the Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanum Guerbrisus, warned that a “large percentage” of the population “is starving”.
Children, pregnant women and breastfeeding women
MSF announced that a quarter of Gaza’s children between the ages of six months and five years and pregnant and breastfeeding women who intended its clinics to inspect last week were suffering from severe malnutrition, accusing Israel using hunger “war weapon.”
For his part, the United Nations World Food Program announced on Friday that about a third of the sector’s population “do not eat for days”, noting that malnutrition has increased significantly.
A Gaza hospital confirmed on Tuesday the death of 21 children within 73 hours due to malnutrition and hunger.
And the very rare foodstuffs available in the sector cannot be obtained due to the high prices of their prices, as the price of a kilogram of flour reached 100 dollars, while the Israeli war on the sector made agricultural lands invalid.
Non -governmental organizations report that almost twenty aid trucks that enter the sector daily are on a regular basis, and they are essentially insufficient to meet the needs of more than two million people from Gaza residents.
“It has become purely technical that we explain that we are in a sharp insecurity of the fourth degree food security on the integrated phase of food security, the population affects almost completely, this does not mean anything to people, while we are in reality we go quickly to starvation, this is certain,” said Amand Bazirol, Emergency Coordinator of the MSF.
Can it be avoided?
About 100 international non -governmental organizations, including doctors without borders, doctors from the world, Carrettas, Amnesty International and Oxfam, called on Israel to open the crossings to humanitarian aid.
However, the Israeli army denies that it is prohibited to enter aid, and on Tuesday confirmed that there are 950 aid trucks in Gaza, waiting for the international agencies to receive them for distribution.
However, NGOs denounce the strict restrictions imposed by Israel, and criticize the distribution system established by Israel and the United States through a special body known as the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.
On Tuesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused the Israeli army of killing more than a thousand people in Gaza since the end of May while they were seeking humanitarian aid, and most of them were near the centers of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
France believes that the “danger of starvation” in Gaza is “as a result of the blockade” imposed by Israel, according to a French Foreign Ministry spokesman last Wednesday.
Israeli government spokesman David Mensar said, “There is no famine in Gaza today that Israel has caused,” accusing Hamas of preventing the distribution and looting of aid, which the movement denies.
Some believe that this artistic or verbal controversy over the declaration of starvation is meaningless about the emergency situation and the urgent needs.
“Any declaration of famine comes … it comes after it is too late. When the famine is officially declared, many lives will be tired,” said Jean Martan Power.
In Somalia, when the famine was officially announced in 2011, half of the total number of victims of the disaster was starvated before.
