Famine ends in Gaza, yet chronic hunger continues to undermine recovery

Palestinian fishermen continue to work along the Gaza coastline under extremely difficult conditions, striving to earn a living and combat hunger despite limited resources and equipment damaged by Israeli attacks, December 18, 2025. 2025 Anadolu

A United Nations body says famine is no longer affecting Gaza. But thousands of people are still malnourished, leading to serious medical complications and impacting future generations.

Despite the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in place since October 10, not enough humanitarian aid is being allowed into the area, warn UN officials and NGOs

They say that more aid is entering Gaza than before October, but that Israel is still blocking food and medical supplies into the territory. The amount being delivered is still insufficient to meet the population’s needs, they declare.

On December 19, the UN-supported organisation IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), a global hunger monitor, announced that there is no longer a famine situation in Gaza.

Though UN agencies welcome the new report, they say hunger, malnutrition, disease and the scale of agricultural destruction remain alarmingly high.

The new report says that at least 1.6 million people – or 77% of the population – are still facing high levels of acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip, including over 100,000 children and 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women projected to suffer acute malnutrition until April next year.

Following the report, Oren Marmorstein, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, declared on the social media platform X that, faced with “overwhelming and unequivocal evidence, even the IPC had to admit that there is no famine in Gaza”.

When hunger becomes famine 

The IPC – a global initiative by UN agencies, aid groups and governments – is the primary mechanism the international community uses to conclude whether a famine is taking place.

Households are classified as IPC Phase 5 (catastrophe) if they experience an extreme lack of food, starvation and exhaustion of coping strategies.

For a famine to be officially declared in a specific area, there must be evidence that:

– at least 20% of households are in Phase 5;

– at least 30% of children are suffering from acute malnutrition;

– there are two deaths for every 10,000 inhabitants per day, or four child deaths out of 10,000 children, “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease”.

On August 22, the IPC confirmed a “man-made” famine in the northern Gaza Strip affecting more than 500,000 people.

“Israel as the occupying power has clear obligations under international law, including the duty to ensure the supply of food and medical goods to the population,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the time.

Under international humanitarian law, it is a war crime to use hunger as a weapon of war.

Roadblocks remain

The ceasefire, which came into effect on October 10 ending two years of war between Hamas and Israel, had planned to considerably increase the flow of aid into Gaza where the population is suffering its worst ever humanitarian crisis.

But the UN and other aid organisations are still repeatedly calling on the Israeli authorities to allow sufficient goods to enter and to open all access points to the Gaza Strip.

“It is important to emphasise that all cargo entering Gaza is (still) subject to approval by the Israeli authorities,” Jens Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Swissinfo in early December.

Laerke said that requests to import various types of aid supplies are often rejected and that many international NGOs are prohibited from bringing aid into the Gaza Strip. 

According to OCHA, only 65% of Gaza’s population received food assistance in November.

The UN Children’s Fund UNICEF reported that two-thirds of children under the age of five ate food from only one or two of the eight recommended food groups in October, mainly grains, bread, or flour.

Combined with limited health services, inadequate water supplies, and poor sanitation, UNICEF says that all 320,000 children under the age of five are still at risk of acute malnutrition.

COGAT, the Israeli military body which controls Gaza’s border crossings, has dismissed claims of deliberate aid restrictions as “inconsistent with facts on the ground, and the ongoing co-ordination taking place daily”. It says that between 600 and 800 lorries carrying humanitarian supplies enter Gaza daily.

Following an outcry over inadequate amounts of aid being allowed into Gaza, Israel opened mid-November a key crossing into northern Gaza.

Under the ceasefire agreement, 600 trucks carrying relief supplies were to enter Gaza daily, but the average is between 200 and 300, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the BBC at the end of October.

In the first week of December, an average of only 140 aid trucks per day from UN convoys crossed the border into the Gaza Strip, say UN organisations.

Furthermore, aid agencies say most of the goods let into Gaza end up for sale in markets and remain too expensive for most of the population.

“We still see commercial trucks taking priority over humanitarian goods,” said Franz Luef, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the Gaza Strip.

Long-lasting effects

Regardless of the new IPC report, UN agencies and NGOs say malnutrition, defined as a lack of enough calories and nutrients, persists and is having long-lasting effects on the population.

UNICEF says the rate of malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women remains “high”. In October, around 9,300 acutely malnourished children under the age of five were admitted for treatment. In August, the monthly figure was 14,000 children, according to UNICEF figures

“In the hospitals of the Gaza Strip, I met several newborns who weighed less than one kilogram,” Tess Ingram, UNICEF Communication Manager in Gaza, told reporters at a media briefing in December. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 36,243 children were treated for severe acute malnutrition in the territory in the first ten months of this year.

Between July and September, around 38% of pregnant women examined by UNICEF and partner organisations were diagnosed with acute malnutrition. And in October alone, aid organisations admitted 8,300 pregnant and breastfeeding women for treatment of acute malnutrition. Ingram expects that babies with low birth weight will continue to be born in the Gaza Strip in the coming months.

“Malnourished children grow up to be malnourished adults who are less able to care for and feed their children,” said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder.

According to MSF, inadequate nutrition can lead to serious medical complications such as infections and delayed wound healing. This often results in the need for amputations. Malnutrition is also linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Malnutrition is not just a short-term emergency, but can become a lifelong struggle, especially for children,” said Franz Luef of MSF. Even a few weeks of severe malnutrition can affect a child’s motor development, he added.

Edited by Virginie Mangin/livm/sb