UN food agency forced to cut aid to 700,000 Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank

Palestinians line up to receive food donated by the World Food Programme at a displacement camp in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

The United Nations has cut food assistance to 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza and 200,000 in the West Bank because of a serious funding shortage, the head of the UN food agency said on Monday.

Carl Skau, acting head of the World Food Programme, urged the international community to provide 450 million dollars (£338 million) so the agency could restore the cut assistance and provide hot meals and food parcels in Gaza and the West Bank for the next six months.

Because of the money shortage, the number of people receiving assistance was reduced this month from 1.6 million to 1.1 million in Gaza and from 400,000 to 200,000 in the West Bank, he said.

Mr Skau, who had just visited both territories, told UN correspondents in a video briefing from Jerusalem that life in Gaza remains “absolutely brutal” and incredibly dangerous, with UN teams recording about 50 attacks per day in the past week.

Nonetheless, he said that since last October’s ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “we have been able to push back on famine”. But an estimated 1.4 million people — or 67% of the population — are still experiencing “acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse”, with around 200,000 requiring immediate food aid to prevent death from hunger, according to WFP.

Mr Skau said WFP will now prioritise food to those most in need — the sick, mothers and children at risk of malnutrition, and people closest to the “yellow line” dividing where Israeli forces remain and Palestinians can live.

Adding to the difficulties, the Israeli military last week halted the shipment of commercial goods, including food, into Gaza. It said on Monday it would resume co-ordinating the entry of commercial trucks into Gaza, but warned that future reports of merchants paying taxes to Hamas would lead to their licences being revoked.

In the West Bank, Mr Skau said, escalating attacks by Israeli settlers have turned what used to be a human rights and protection crisis “into a hunger crisis, because food insecurity has more than doubled in the last three years”. He said almost a million Palestinians there now need food assistance.

During his visit Mr Skau said he saw burned down olive fields, camps and villages.

“The settler attacks over only these first two weeks of harvest have already surpassed the whole of last year in terms of number of attacks,” he said.

Mr Skau warned that “where hunger spreads, instability follows”, and he said “food is now a line that we cannot afford to cross”.