Why has UN declared a famine in Gaza City now? How bad is the situation?

It’s official. Gaza is now suffering from now a famine. This is what a UN-backed body has declared on Friday.  The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has determined that Gaza City is in the grips of famine.

The IPC says the famine is likely to spread across Gaza in the absence of a ceasefire or Israel loosening its restrictions on aid . The development comes after months of experts warning that Gaza is on the brink of starvation.

The IPC in its 59-page report blamed the renewed Israeli offensive, more and more Palestinians being displaced over the past few weeks and a complete Israeli blockade on the territory. It warned that there should be “no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed”.

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Israel has rejected the report, claiming it is ‘false and biased’ and that is based on ‘partial data originating from the Hamas Terrorist Organisation”.

But why has the UN-backed body declared a famine in Gaza City now? How bad is the situation?

Let’s take a closer look

Why declare a famine in Gaza City now?

First let’s take a brief look at the IPC. The IPC is the world’s leading authority on food crises. It comprises experts from nearly two dozen groups including the UN’s health, development, and food aid agencies; charity CARE International; the Famine Early Warning Systems Network; and the European Union and the World Bank.

Now, let’s look at the IPC’s methodology. The IPC in its report outlined how it classified the situation in Gaza City – which comprises around 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip – as a famine. It said around 50 experts from nearly two dozen organisations examined and collated the data – which was done by merging phone-based surveys and food consumption trends.

It said it judged malnutrition via examining arm circumferences in the field. The IPC said it used public health and other “contextual information” was used to approximation mortality. This, it says, is its SOP when there is a surfeit of “reliable data”.

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It said it also measured “contributing factors” such the war, how many people were displaced, whether or not people could get to markets, the cost of goods, availability of water and sanitation and whether health and nutrition help was available.

The IPC says it only surveyed three of Gaza’s governorates – leaving out the depopulated Rafah and North Gaza due to the lack of data. The IPC says it uses three levels to determine the reliability of evidence. It placed the data available in the report as a level 2 – a medium level.

Now, look at how the IPC classifies food insecurity.

The agency does so on a scale of 1 to 5 –  with five being the worst.

It says Level 5, known as a “catastrophe”, is when “households experience an extreme lack of food and/or cannot meet other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies”. It says “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition are evident” during a catastrophe.

However, even this isn’t enough to declare a famine.

The IPC only declares a “famine with reasonable evidence” if there is proof that two of three are suffering acute food insecurity, acute malnutrition and mortality.

A minimum of 20 percent of households must “have an extreme lack of food and face starvation and destitution” , there must be acute malnutrition in at least 30 per cent of children under five and two deaths per 10,000 per day daily as a result of food insecurity.

How bad is the situation?

The IPC says over 500,000 people in the Gaza Strip are staring at “catastrophic conditions” – the top level in its hierarchy of food insecurity.

The IPC says that in the larger Gaza Governorate around 30 per cent of the population is facing catastrophic conditions. Meanwhile, with 50 per cent are staring at an “emergency” – which is one level under catastrophic conditions.

The IPC said the situation in North Gaza governorate is believed to be “as severe – or worse – than in Gaza Governorate”. However, it cannot reach a firm conclusion due to the absence of reliable data.

The IPC has said Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis governorates will also be the in the grips of famine by September end. The IPC estimates that that 25 and 20 percent of the population in those areas are at a level 5 catastrophe.

The IPC has not considered Rafah – Gaza’s southernmost governorate – because it has been largely rendered empty as a result of Israel’s military operations.

The 500,000 number, which is based on information gathered between July 1 and August 15, is expected to increase to nearly 641,000 people – nearly a third of the population – by the end of September.

In early March, Israel completely banned aid supplies from Gaza, before allowing very limited quantities to enter at the end of May, leading to severe shortages of food, medicine, and fuel.

When is a famine declared?

Famine can appear in pockets — sometimes small ones — and a formal classification requires caution.

Last year, experts said a famine was ongoing in parts of North Darfur in Sudan. Somalia, in 2011, and South Sudan, in 2017, also saw famines in which tens of thousands of people were affected.

Gaza poses a particular complication for experts since access is severely limited, making gathering data difficult if not impossible in some cases.

Even more confusingly, there’s no final authority on who gets to declare a famine.

The IPC says it is the “primary mechanism” used by the international community to analyse data and conclude whether a famine is happening or projected. However, it doesn’t usually make such a statement itself.

UN officials or governments usually do so by relying on IPC data.

“There’s a widespread misunderstanding that someone has to declare a famine before it is a famine. That is not the case,” said Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “When IPC shows the data that hits the threshold for a famine, then it’s a famine.”

‘Failure of humanity’

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called the development ‘a failure of humanity’.

“Just when it seems there are no words left to describe the living hell in Gaza, a new one has been added: ‘famine’,” Guterres said.

He added that it is “not a mystery,” but rather “a man-made disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself”.

“Famine is not only about food; it is the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival,” Guterres added.

UN aid chief Tom Fletcher said the famine was entirely preventable , saying food could not get through to the Palestinian territory “because of systematic obstruction by Israel”.

Speaking in Geneva, Fletcher said the famine should “haunt us all”.

“It is a famine that we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel,” he told reporters.

The IPC noted the local food system has also collapsed, with an estimated 98 per cent of cropland in the Gaza Strip either damaged, inaccessible or both, livestock decimated and fishing banned.

To add to this, the health system has severely deteriorated, while access to safe drinking water and adequate hygiene has been drastically reduced.

But Israel’s Foreign Ministry immediately hit back, saying “there is no famine in Gaza”.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians.

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 62,192 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.

Both from agencies