514 Thousand Gazans Starved While Israel Blocked Humanitarian Aid
JAKARTA - Starvation hit parts of Gaza and is likely to expand next month. This condition will increase pressure on Israel to allow more humanitarian aid to the war-torn Palestinian territories.
The Integrated Food Safety Phase Classification System (IPC) stated that 514,000 people or nearly a quarter of the total Palestinians in Gaza were starving.
This number is expected to increase to 641,000 by the end of September.
About 280,000 of them are in the northern region which includes Gaza City known as Gaza's Governorate, which according to the IPC is being hit by starvation, their first determination in the enclave.
The rest are in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, the central and southern regions projected by IPC to be hit by starvation by the end of next month.
Israel rejected the report as "wrong and biased", saying the IPC based its survey on "partial data originating from the Hamas Terrorist Organization".
In order for an area to be classified as a hunger area, at least 20% of its population must suffer from extreme food shortages, with one in three children experiencing acute malnutrition and two out of every 10,000 people dying daily from hunger or malnutrition and disease.
Even if an area has not been classified as an area prone to hunger because the threshold has not been met, the IPC can determine the household there suffering from a condition of hunger, which it describes as hunger, poverty, and death.
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The head of the UN Human Rights Agency, Volker T\"urk, said on Friday, August 22. The hunger in Gaza was a direct result of the actions of the Israeli government, and warned that the death from hunger could be considered a war crime.
The IPC analysis comes after Britain, Canada, Australia, and many European countries said the humanitarian crisis had reached an "inconceivable level" after nearly two years of war between Israel and Palestinian militants, Hamas.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has long warned of the "catastrophic humanitarian catastrophe" in the region of more than 2 million people.