WFP Cuts Food Aid to 700,000 in Gaza and West Bank Amid Fund Shortage

Gaza: The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has cut food assistance to 500,000 people in Gaza and 200,000 in the West Bank because of a serious funding shortage, its acting head, Carl Skau, said on Monday.

The number of people receiving help in Gaza was reduced this month from 1.6 million to 1.1 million, still about half the population, while in the West Bank the figure fell from 400,000 to 200,000. Families still on the programme in Gaza will now receive one food parcel instead of two and a smaller bag of wheat flour. Skau urged the international community to give $450 million so the WFP can restore the lost aid and provide hot meals and food parcels over the next six months. The agency has received only about half its usual funding for the Palestinian territories this year, a drop AFP linked to deep US cuts to UN agencies and other aid.

Skau said the WFP had been able to push back on famine since last October’s ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, an assessment Israel has disputed. Even so, about 1.4 million people in Gaza, or 67 per cent of the population, face acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, and around 200,000 need immediate food aid to prevent death from hunger. The agency will now prioritise the sick, mothers and children at risk of malnutrition, and people living closest to the “yellow line” that divides areas held by Israeli forces from those where Palestinians can live.

In the West Bank, Skau said escalating settler attacks have turned a protection crisis into a hunger crisis, with food insecurity more than doubling in three years and almost a million people now needing food assistance.