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The world’s leading authority on food insecurity has confirmed a famine in Gaza.

In a report published Friday, the United Nations-backed group of experts finds that over half a million people parts of north Gaza are at risk of dying from starvation, and hundreds of thousands more people face catastrophic shortages as the famine spreads to other areas.

“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed. The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification or IPC report says.

The images of skeletal children in Gaza have already caused widespread protests around the world against the Israeli offensive there, and prompted some of Israel’s most important Western allies to say they will recognize a Palestinian state. The IPC report brings the facts behind those photographs of starvation into stark relief.

It says famine, the most extreme classification of hunger, is occurring in Gaza Governorate and projected to expand to Deir al- Balah and Khan Younis governorates by the end of September.

Describing the situation as a “race against time,” the report says at least 132,000 children under the age of five could die from acute malnutrition in the coming months.

This estimate has doubled since an IPC report in May, showing just how drastically the conditions have worsened in Gaza in recent weeks.

Nearly 55,500 malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women will require an urgent nutrition response.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said Thursday 271 people have so far died in the famine, including 112 children.

This is the first time famine has been confirmed in the Middle East. And it’s happened in a 25-mile-long strip of land, where trucks piled with thousands of tons of food are parked at border crossings.

The Gazans now dying of starvation are never more than a few miles from warehouses filled with food aid that they have no way to reach.

“This is the direct result of months of deliberate restrictions on aid, the destruction of Gaza’s food, health, and water systems, and relentless bombardment,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps said in response to the statement. “This is a man-made catastrophe, entirely preventable and entirely unconscionable.”

Earlier this month, more than a hundred international organizations, including Caritas Internationalis and Doctors Without Borders, accused Israel of “weaponizing” aid to help achieve its aims in Gaza. The statement from Aug. 13 said, “despite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs have been unable to deliver a single truck of lifesaving supplies since 2 March.”

They said their operations are hampered by new, more restrictive Israeli regulations for international aid groups, which they say have resulted in Israeli authorities denying dozens of permissions for groups to bring their aid into Gaza. “This obstruction has left millions of dollars’ worth of food, medicine, water, and shelter items stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt, while Palestinians are being starved,” the statement said.

Israel’s military, which controls all supplies going in and out of Gaza, has repeatedly denied there is mass hunger in the Palestinian enclave. Israel also denies accusations of deliberate starvation and says its restrictions on aid are to pressure Hamas and prevent its fighters from benefiting from it.

But the result has been a breakdown in the aid system for Gaza’s population living under Israeli blockade, even before this war.

On July 29, an IPC alert warned that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was playing out in the Gaza Strip. It underscored the devastating living situation for Gaza’s some two million citizens, almost two years since the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, prompted a full-scale Israeli military invasion of Gaza.

After Israel tightened restrictions on supplies entering Gaza in mid-March, food dried up.  In the weeks that followed, adults prioritized feeding their children over themselves as a coping strategy, which, according to the IPC alert, initially mitigated a rise in acute child malnutrition.

However, by April, supplies had become so scarce that parents could no longer protect their children this way. The IPC alert said that between April and mid-July, over 20,000 children had to be treated for acute malnutrition.

What little sustenance could be found in markets skyrocketed in price.  In June, wheat flour prices increased between 1,400% and 5,600% compared to late February. By July, the IPC alert stated nearly nine out of ten households had to resort to taking “significant safety risks” to find food and scavenge from garbage.

In July, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called Gaza a “horror show” of devastation and starvation, marked by “a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.”

Hundreds of civilians have been reported shot dead as they cross dangerous, militarized zones to receive supplies from the aid distribution sites of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The foundation disputes that the killings occur near its centers and says it has distributed 132 million meals.

But aid experts say that much of what the group gives out is not ready-to-eat and requires water and fuel for cooking — resources that are hard to come by in Gaza, where Israeli bombardment has devastated critical infrastructure.

Moreover, experts say the distribution sites are located primarily in militarized zones along the Khan Younis–Rafah border, where less than a quarter of Gaza’s population lives.

Finding food and resources for cooking has been made all the more difficult by the frequent and often repeated forced displacements of families across the Gaza Strip. The IPC report said some 800,000 people have had to leave their homes in waves of displacement that have forced people to abandon any remaining resources, further disrupted access to essential health services and compounded humanitarian needs.

The confirmation of famine comes as Israel’s security cabinet approved plans for Israeli soldiers and 60,000 reservists to move into Gaza City.

The U.N. says that already nearly 90% of Gaza is under military control or off-limits to Palestinians. Gaza City is home to tens of thousands of Gazans displaced from other parts of the strip and has several of the territory’s last partially functioning hospitals. The Israeli military has started calling doctors and international organizations in the city, telling them to leave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will now resume negotiations for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and an end to the nearly two-year-old war, but on terms acceptable to Israel. It comes in response to a temporary ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar that Hamas accepted on Monday.

Israel will dispatch negotiators to talks once a location is set, an Israeli official said. Netanyahu, however, also said he remained set on approving plans for capturing Gaza City.

The talks could offer a moment’s hope to Palestinians desperate for a ceasefire that the experts behind the IPC report say is so desperately needed as a first step to address the famine in Gaza.

But for now, the situation in the Strip remains desperate. The United Nations’ World Food Programme said in a recent report that “public order has broken down” and that “after 22 months of fighting, the social fabric of Gaza is collapsing as the fear of starvation intensifies.”

Almost all the trucks carrying WFP food aid inside Gaza have been stopped before reaching their destination by civilians desperate to find the sustenance they need for themselves and their families to survive.