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Every resident of Gaza is at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity — and half are at risk of famine.

Yes, you read that right: Nearly six months into the Israeli invasion after Hamas's October 7 attacks, every single Gaza resident is at risk of at least crisis-level food insecurity, defined as households having high levels of malnutrition or resorting to “irreversible” coping mechanisms like selling livestock or furniture to afford even an insufficient diet. 

It’s a crisis that has unfolded at a speed utterly unprecedented this century — and also one that was repeatedly predicted and entirely avoidable if Israel were not placing severe restrictions on aid. 

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, defines five levels of food insecurity: Phase 1 (minimal), Phase 2 (stressed), Phase 3 (crisis), Phase 4 (emergency), and finally, Phase 5 (famine). More than 1 million people in Gaza could face famine by mid-July if a Rafah escalation occurs, according to a new IPC report.

Soon, “more than 200 people [will be] dying from starvation per day,” a UN aid spokesperson told reporters last week.

Though the Israeli government, through its official channels and to Vox, denies the possibility of famine in Gaza and disputes numbers released in the IPC report, facts on the ground show increasing desperation for the people of Gaza. 

“If you cut off food, water, and power to a population that is fully dependent on importing, this is what you get,” Jeremy Kondynyk, president of Refugees International, told Vox in an interview. “I mean, that is just math.”

Nicole Narea/Vox

The speed at which Gaza has reached its current depth of food insecurity is practically unheard of in the 21st century. 

“I can't think of another situation in which you have the entire population of an area in this level of food insecurity in such a short space of time,” Ciarán Donnelly, the International Rescue Committee’s senior vice president for crisis, response, recovery, and development, told Vox.

Famines have become rarer because the world produces far more food than is necessary to feed the global population, and humanitarian networks have stepped up to address gaps in access. The IPC has only officially designated two famines since its founding in 2004: the 2011 famine in Somalia and the 2017 famine in South Sudan.

Most modern famines tend to have political causes, including wars and authoritarian rule, that magnify the already destructive effects of droughts, natural disasters, pests, climate change, or other natural stressors on the food supply. 

The looming famine in Gaza, however, has no natural causes.

The share of Palestinians in Gaza facing the highest levels of food insecurity as defined by the IPC system makes this one of the worst acute hunger crises in recent memory. Even at the peak of Somalia’s worst drought in 40 years and amid the ongoing civil war in Yemen, there was not such a high concentration of people experiencing crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity and famine. 

Nicole Narea/Vox

Prior to the October 7 attacks on Israel, the Israeli government tightly controlled the flow of goods entering Gaza, having ramped up oversight since Hamas took over the territory in 2007 and creating what many international law experts call a de facto occupation. 

Then, two days after the Hamas attacks, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, barring fuel, food, water, and electricity from entering the territory. (Siege warfare against an occupied territory is illegal under international law.) While Israel later allowed limited supplies, including food and medical aid, to enter the territory, and minimal sources of clean water have been restored, none of these necessities are near the level that they were before the war started.

“One-fourth of calories needed is what's getting in,” Tak Igusa, professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a contributor to a joint Johns Hopkins and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report on death projections in Gaza due to the war, told Vox. “So just imagine having one-fourth of what you usually eat for such a long duration. And it’s getting worse.”

Aid groups on the ground say Israel is to blame. 

The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military unit charged with overseeing civilian matters in Gaza and the West Bank, told Vox in a statement that it does not block entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza. It inspects supplies entering Gaza to prevent weapons or anything that could be used for military purposes from reaching Hamas.

Though Israel is no longer maintaining an all-out blockade as a matter of policy, accounts from NGOs on the ground show that in practice Israel prevents huge amounts of aid from entering. 

Oxfam published a report this week accusing Israel of deliberately doing so, with aid trucks waiting an average of 20 days to enter and Israel rejecting a warehouse's worth of supplies, including oxygen, incubators, water, and sanitation equipment.

James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, described to Vox witnessing plentiful aid, ready and waiting to cross into the region — then seeing only a dozen trucks cross through.

If the food insecurity crisis continues on its current trajectory, more Palestinians in Gaza will die of hunger and  preventable infectious diseases that attack the weakened immune systems of hungry people. 

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University project that by August the number of excess deaths in Gaza — including from disease outbreaks — could potentially exceed 85,000 if there’s an escalation in the conflict. And an escalation seems likely: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims he has no choice but to order an imminent ground invasion of Rafah, the area of southern Gaza where as many as 1.4 million people are trapped trying to avoid intense conflict in the rest of the region.

“So many, many warnings have been made,” Elder said. “And history will judge very, very poorly those who had the decision-making power — and we must be very clear, children are suffering, children are dying, dehydrating to death, because of decisions made by those in power. Children's pain is avoidable. Their loss is avoidable.” 

—Nicole Narea and Ellen Ioanes

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