Israel has rejected a UN-backed report that claimed 500,000 Gazans were suffering from “catastrophic” hunger, dismissing it as “misleading” and “biased” on Thursday. The report, published by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership, stated that while a famine, previously warned about in March, hadn’t materialized in the northern Palestinian territories, the situation in Gaza remained dire. The report cautioned against complacency, stating that there was a “high and sustained risk of famine across the whole Gaza Strip.”
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer, however, denounced the report, attributing its supposed bias to its reliance on data from Hamas’s health institutions. While Gaza’s Hamas-run government provides data on the war, including death tolls, which has been disputed by Israel in the past, it has generally been accepted by international media and aid organizations. Mencer asserted that claims of starvation in Gaza were baseless and aimed at pressuring Israel.
The IPC report detailed that approximately 495,000 people in Gaza were grappling with “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity”, while another 745,000 were categorized as facing a food security emergency. The UN’s World Food Programme acknowledged the report’s bleak depiction of the hunger situation, but also highlighted the positive impact of increased access to food and nutrition services in the north, which had helped reduce the most severe levels of hunger. However, the program warned that the situation in the south of Gaza was deteriorating, citing the May hostilities in Rafah, which displaced over a million people and severely restricted humanitarian access.
The IPC, a collaboration of over 20 partners including governments, UN agencies, and non-governmental organizations, had previously published a hunger report in March, which Israel also dismissed, citing inaccuracies and questionable sources. The current conflict began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli figures. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has, according to data from Gaza’s health ministry, claimed the lives of at least 37,765 people, also largely civilians.
