Gazans are starving, falling sick, and dying. Why has the UN not declared a ‘famine' in the war-torn land yet?
Till Sunday (July 27), aid into the Palestinian enclave was being routed only through the Israeli-American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). However, around 900 Gazans in the recent weeks have been killed at the GHF aid sites while trying to gather food, according to the UN human rights office, OHCHR.
On Sunday, amid increasing criticism of the humanitarian situation, Israel said it would halt military operations for 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza and allow new aid corridors.
However, even as alarm over the crisis in Gaza is rising, officially, famine is yet to be declared in the battered enclave.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, states that the formal declaration of a famine comes with caution. Set up in 2004, the IPC is the leading international authority on food crises, which includes over a dozen UN agencies, aid groups, governments and other bodies.
The IPC was developed during a food emergency in Somalia by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) along with global partners. It is coordinated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.
FEWS NET, meanwhile, was established in 1985, in response to famines in East and West Africa when US aid officials realised the need for a way to monitor global hunger. It was founded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to collect and analyse data from at-risk areas on a monthly-basis.
The IPC defines famine as an extreme deprivation of food, its official website stated. 'Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident,' as described in the IPC Famine Classification processes.
A famine, as per the IPC, can be declared when all of the following three conditions are confirmed:
— 20% of households have an extreme lack of food, or are essentially starving.
— At least 30% of children (six months to five years old) suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, meaning they're too thin for their height.
— At least two people or four children under five per 10,000 are dying everyday due to starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
Even though the IPC remains the 'primary mechanism' utilised by the international community to determine whether a country is in the grip of a famine, it is often the UN, along with government institutions and multiple other high-level representatives, who possess the authority to declare a famine in an area.
Why does the declaration of famine matter?
The IPC's classification system acts as a powerful tool in informing, alerting, and mobilising the world before a crisis gets out of hand. Declaring a famine could scale up the global humanitarian response to Gaza.
A few countries where the IPC has recently declared famines are Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and in parts of Sudan's western Darfur region in 2024.
What is the status of Gaza?
IPC's analyses released on May 12 expected close to 71,000 children under the age of five to be acutely malnourished over the following 11 months (that is, April 2025-March 2026) in Gaza.Of these, 14,100 cases were expected to be severe. Moreover, nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women would also require treatment for acute malnutrition during this period.
IPC categorises hunger crisis on a five-point scale: Phase 1 (Acceptable or, Normal), Phase 2 (Alert or, Stressed), Phase 3 (Serious or, Crisis), Phase 4 (Critical or, Emergency), and Phase 5 (Extremely Critical, Catastrophe or, Famine).
Between May to September-end, the IPC projected the whole territory of Gaza to be classified under Emergency (IPC Phase 4), with the entire population expected to face Crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above).
This includes 470,000 people (22 per cent of the population) in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5), over a million people (54 per cent) in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and the remaining half million (24 per cent) in Crisis (IPC Phase 3).
Also, in Gaza, there persists an impossibility to gather accurate data, with limited access to the territory for experts, and completely damaged infrastructure and care and monitoring networks.
The Commissioner-General for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, last Thursday posted on X that one in every five children is malnourished in Gaza City.
Lazzarini said most UNRWA workers are surviving on a meagre bowl of lentils each day, leading many of them to faint from hunger at work.
He also pointed out that UNRWA has 6,000 trucks of food and medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt, which he demanded be immediately let through.
'Families are no longer coping. They are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened,' he said. 'Allow humanitarian partners to bring unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance to Gaza.'
Are there no aid trucks entering Gaza now?
The food crisis in Gaza intensified early March this year, when Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, demanding Palestinian militant group Hamas to release all the remaining hostages.
In May, when the blockade was lifted after 11 weeks, Israel allowed limited UN deliveries to resume, and over 400 Palestinians were killed as they tried to reach the aid sites.
Since then, Israel has allowed in around 4,500 trucks from the UN and other aid groups, to distribute, among other things, 2,500 tonnes of baby food and high-calorie special food for children, Israel's Foreign Ministry stated last week.
Amid increased international pressure, the Israeli military Saturday night began to airdrop aid into the Strip. These included seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar and canned food, the Israel Defence Forces stated over a Telegram post on Sunday.
On Saturday, Israel said that over 250 trucks carrying aid from the UN and other organizations entered Gaza this week. This is much lesser than the about 600 trucks that entered Gaza per day when the ceasefire was in place until March.
The Israeli military also said on Saturday that it would establish humanitarian corridors for United Nations convoys, but refrained from providing further details.
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