The population of Gaza is on the brink of famine

The food insecurity situation in the Gaza Strip is becoming increasingly dire. A recent blog of just 10 days ago and based on an assessment by the World Food Programme pointed out that during October and November, 80 percent of the population in Gaza was displaced and more than 80 percent suffered food deficiencies. A new assessment by the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) for Acute Food Insecurity conducted in early December sketches an even gloomier picture with an estimated 85% of the population  displaced and  93% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population facing crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) (Figure 1). This is the highest share of a population facing severe and acute food insecurity in any given context since IPC started making these assessments twenty years ago. According to the IPC assessment, over 15% of the population (378,000 people) were in IPC Phase 5, defined as “Catastrophe,” that is, a condition where “even with any humanitarian assistance at least one in five households in an area have an extreme lack of food and other basic needs where starvation, death, and destitution are evident.”