Gaza City and surrounding areas are officially under famine, monitors say

Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced 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 2 million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is made up of experts who monitor world hunger.

For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to worsen, sending two additional governorates further south – Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis – into an official famine by the end of September.

The group said in a report published Friday that a combination of factors had tipped Gaza into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care, water and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people had been forced to flee for new shelters.

It said that conditions in the northernmost part of Gaza were likely to be as severe, or worse, than in Gaza City, but that it had not had enough data to judge whether famine was occurring there. It also said it did not analyze Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, because most people there had been forced to leave.

The report said famine in Gaza could be “halted and reversed” because it was “entirely man-made.”

Even a short delay in flooding Gaza with aid would “exponentially” increase preventable deaths, it said.

Throughout the war, Israeli officials have consistently played down or denied the severity of hunger in Gaza. In a statement Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called the report “an outright lie.”

His office and the Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries to the enclave said the experts had overlooked Israel’s efforts over the last few weeks to bring more food into the territory, which they said had improved the situation.

Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.