UN-backed food security experts warned on Monday that one in every five Palestinians, or almost half a million people, in Gaza face starvation and one million others can barely get enough to eat.
The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity,” said the UN Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform.
Humanitarian groups say 116,000 tons of food aid is sitting and spoiling at Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel, which the latter has refused to allow into the Strip since 2 March.
For almost 70 days, more than two million Palestinians have had no food, water, fuel, medication or other lifesaving needs after Israel blocked the entry of aid to pressure Hamas, the Islamic Resistance group, to release hostages without an agreement to end the war.
While Israel is being accused of weaponising famine, which is spreading in pockets across Gaza, it has also used its 18-month-old war against the enclave to enforce decades old efforts to dismantle UNRWA, the only UN relief agency dedicated to carrying out the vast majority of humanitarian work in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem for approximately six million registered Palestinian refugees.
Last year, Israel banned UNRWA from operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and enforced the decision in January this year by barring the entry of the agency’s employees to the OPT.
The Israeli government says that UNRWA’s services can be transferred to other entities. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an agency which Israel and the US seeks to replace UNRWA, was registered in Switzerland February.
Last week, the Israeli Cabinet approved a plan to seize more land in Gaza and move Palestinians to a designated zone with food and supplies provided by US security contractors using facial-recognition screening.
On the same day, US President Donald Trump said that his administration would get food to “starving” Palestinians in Gaza, while blaming Hamas for the blockade that Israel has enforced for over two months, creating a man-made famine in the Strip.
Days later, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told reporters in Jerusalem that a US plan to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza had been launched. Little has been revealed about Trump’s initiative, but some reports have suggested that it will take shape during his Gulf tour where the US President hopes to get funding from Arab allies.
The Trump administration has reportedly tried to enlist David Beasley, a former head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), to oversee the initiative.
The plan, which would see food distributed to selected Gazans at Israeli-designated locations in military-occupied areas through the Gaza Humanitarian Organisation, will rely on US-based contractors – including one led by a former head of the CIA’s paramilitary arm – to guard aid “hubs” it plans to set up in areas of Gaza without the involvement of the Israeli Occupation Forces.
The Israeli military will not be stationed at the “hubs” but will nevertheless be present “at a distance,” according to Huckabee.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee this week, while referring to the humanitarian aid distribution plan in Gaza, that receiving the aid would be conditional on the Gazans who receive it not returning to the places from which they arrive at the aid distribution sites, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv.
The UN and major groups currently running aid operations in Gaza said they would not cooperate with the plans.
The plans appear to be designed “to reinforce control over life‑sustaining items as a pressure tactic and will drive further displacement,” UN children’s agency UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder said on Friday, calling it a choice “between displacement and death.”
They contravene fundamental humanitarian principles and appear to be designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic and “as part of a military strategy,” the UN and its aid partners in Gaza said in a joint statement.
“We will not participate in any scheme that does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality,” they said.
The new aid zone would include around four to 10 aid distribution hubs located in between two Israeli-held strips of land in southern Gaza, the Morag and Netzarim Corridors, according to the US radio station NPR, citing sources familiar with the plan.
UNWRA was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly Resolution with a mandate to provide temporary assistance to Palestinian refugees displaced during the Nakba of 1948. In 1967, Israel signed a formal agreement recognising UNRWA activity in the West Bank and Gaza and committing not to interfere in the affairs of the UN agency in the humanitarian field.
In the absence of Palestinian statehood, UNRWA’s work continued to expand into the everyday lives of Palestinian refugees who since its inception have relied on the agency for food, healthcare, schooling, and employment among other items.
The existence of UNRWA, however, has remained a thorn in the side of consecutive Israeli governments, because it is the only UN-backed entity assigned to recognise the Palestinian refugee crisis and the protection and rights that both international law and UN conventions give them.
The Palestinian refugee problem was born out of Israel’s creation in 1948 on Palestinian territory and the forced expulsion of the indigenous population by Zionist militias in and after 1947. The existence of UNRWA has long been a source of frustration for the Israeli regime.
Observers say that Israel has sought an opportunity through its war on Gaza since October 2023 to end UNRWA’s presence in the OPT. After a series of unsubstantiated accusations that the agency employs Hamas members, the Israeli Occupation Forces bombed UNRWA offices and warehouses in Gaza and killed 300 staff members, according to the agency.
UNRWA provided for almost half the humanitarian aid that went to the Palestinians in Gaza. Other UN agencies like UNICEF and the WFP, among others, provide the other half.
The WFP and UNICEF have warned that hunger and malnutrition have intensified sharply in Gaza since all aid was blocked from entering the Strip by Israel on 2 March.
WFP chief Cindy McCain said families are starving while the food they need is sitting at the border. “It’s imperative that the international community acts urgently to get aid flowing into Gaza again,” she said.
“If we wait until after a famine is confirmed, it will already be too late for many people.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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