FOOD IS SCARCE in Gaza. Many residents are eating leaves and foraging for scraps on the streets, according to Save the Children, a charity. Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, deliveries of food to the strip have been insufficient. Evidently, neither Israel nor Hamas considers getting food to the starving to be a priority. Israel insists it is not obstructing aid lorries. But the situation is so bad that America and others have begun air-dropping food into Gaza. America is also planning to build a pier to allow faster deliveries by sea.
On March 18th the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed initiative responsible for a scale that measures hunger, said that 30% of Gaza’s population is experiencing catastrophic food insecurity. It was able to analyse 95% of the population, about 2.1m people, and concluded that none of them were “food secure”. Since it was established 20 years ago the IPC has declared only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017. Unless there is a ceasefire and faster supplies of aid, the IPC believes it will have grounds to declare a third in Gaza’s northern governates by May, and in southern Gaza by July. What exactly constitutes a famine?
Famine has a technical definition, detailed in a 125-page manual. The IPC scale places individual households into one of five categories of food insecurity, ranging from “minimal”, meaning a household can meet its basic needs, to “famine”. In order to classify a household as experiencing famine, the UN must see evidence of starvation or extreme malnutrition. To put a whole area into that category, at least 20% of households must be in phase five. There are other criteria, too: the death rate from starvation must be higher than two per day per 10,000 people. For children younger than five, who are most vulnerable to food shortages, it must be higher than four.
How does the IPC make its assessments? Any country or partner of the IPC can trigger a formal review if it suspects that famine is happening in a given place. When that happens, a group of independent humanitarian organisations are tasked with collecting data. This usually means UN agencies such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF going house to house, weighing children and asking about food intake and deaths.
But the conditions in Gaza made this impossible, obliging the IPC to rely on other data. It turned to UNOSAT, the UN’s Satellite Centre, which analysed images of agricultural land; and the World Food Programme, which questioned shop owners over the phone about shortages. An independent group of security, nutrition and mortality experts reviewed the evidence they gathered. On this basis, the IPC concluded that Gaza is currently in phase four, a food “emergency”—but warned that parts of the north may already have tipped into famine (see chart).
Interpreting data is difficult: most hunger-related deaths result from a combination of malnutrition and disease. In war-torn places like Gaza, collecting it is hard in the first place. In parts of the strip information is patchy. In the north, where 300,000 people are still living, only a handful of hospitals and clinics are operating, which limits the supply of health data. It is hard to reach families on the phone when they have little access to electricity or mobile signals.
But the evidence that the IPC has gathered paints a bleak picture. It found that Israeli strikes had damaged 60% of Gaza’s farmland by January and 56% of water facilities by February. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that “severely restricted” aid deliveries were not enough to sustain the population. It estimated that less than 5% of food trucks entering the strip reached the north in the month to March 18th. The IPC’s report helped to galvanise the UN Security Council, which on March 25th called for an immediate ceasefire. Without one, people in Gaza will continue to starve.■
Editor’s note (March 27th 2024): This article has been updated to better explain the reasons why Gaza faces famine.