The United Nations says more than a half-million people are starving in Gaza because not enough food has entered the besieged territory as Israel keeps up its blistering campaign of airstrikes and ground operations.
Palestinian officials said Friday that the death toll has now exceeded 20,000 — around 1% of the territory’s prewar population.
The Health Ministry in Gaza does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says more than 130 of its soldiers have died in its ground offensive after Hamas raided southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and taking about 240 hostages.
“This is a grave development and should be a wake-up call for the whole world to act now to prevent a deadly human catastrophe,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Crisis Management Commissioner Janez Lenarcic said in a statement.
An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification assessment released Thursday said that “hostilities, including bombardment, ground operations and besiegement of the entire population have caused catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity across the Gaza Strip.”
Just over 2 million people usually live in Gaza. About 85% of them are estimated to have been forced to flee their homes.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Friday that it has documented 20,057 deaths in the fighting. It does not differentiate between combatant and civilian deaths. It has previously said that roughly two-thirds of the dead were women or minors.
UNITED NATIONS — Members of the United Nations Security Council again delayed a vote on a now-watered down Arab-sponsored resolution for a halt in combat to allow for increased aid deliveries in Gaza. A vote, initially set for Monday, has been delayed each day since then. The United States now supports the resolution, but other council members said that because of the significant changes, they needed to consult their capitals before a vote, which is now expected on Friday.
Other countries support a stronger text in the resolution that would include the now-eliminated call for the urgent suspension of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.
ISRAELI PRESIDENT BLAMES UNITED NATIONS FOR LACK OF AID ENTERING GAZA
JERUSALEM — Israeli President Isaac Herzog has blamed the United Nations for the small amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza.
Herzog said Thursday that three times as much could get in “if the U.N., instead of complaining all day, would do its job.”
According to the United Nations, only 10% of the aid required by Gaza’s 2.2 million has entered the enclave in the last 70 days.
The U.N. closed one of only two border crossings into Gaza on Thursday after an Israeli airstrike killed four people there. Israel shut all the crossings into Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that started the war, allowing only the Rafah gate from Egypt to stay open. But Israel later opened a second crossing following international pressure.
Speaking to reporters alongside the visiting president of the French senate, Herzog also said Israel was fighting on behalf of the free world and “if we were not here, Europe would be next.”
UN REPORT SAYS NEARLY 577,000 PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN GAZA
ROME — An interagency U.N. and nongovernmental organization report finds that a staggering half a million people in Gaza — one quarter of the population — are starving due “woefully insufficient” quantities of food entering the territory since the outbreak of hostilities on Oct. 7.
“It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry. More than 500,000 people, half a million people, are starving. That means that one in every four people is starving in Gaza as we speak,’’ World Food Program chief economist Arif Husain said.
He warned that if the war continues at the same levels and food deliveries are not restored that the population could face “a full-fledged famine within the next six months” with widespread outbreaks of disease.
The report released Thursday by 23 U.N and nongovernmental agencies found that the entire population of 2.2 million Gazans are in a food crisis or worse: 478,000 are at crisis levels, 1.17 million are at emergency levels and 576,600 are at catastrophic — that is starvation — levels.
“It doesn’t get any worse,” Hasain said. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed. How quickly it has happened, in just a matter of two months.”
