UN, MSF warn of soaring hunger in Gaza Strip; WCK: Hot meal service resumes in Deir al-Balah

Almost a third of people in Gaza are “not eating for days,” the United Nations food aid agency tells AFP, as medical non-profit Doctors Without Borders says a quarter of all young children or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in the Strip last month were malnourished.

“Nearly one person in three is not eating for days. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment,” a statement from the Rome-based World Food Programme says, describing the crisis as having reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation.”

It says 470,000 people are expected to face “catastrophic hunger” — the most critical category under the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase classification — between May and September this year.

“Food aid is the only way for people to access any food as food prices are through the roof,” the WFP says. “People are dying from a lack of humanitarian assistance.”

Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, accuses Israel of “deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza, [which] has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive.”

“Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent were malnourished,” says MSF.

Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said earlier today that “there is no famine in the Gaza Strip,” but acknowledges that “there are issues of access to food.” Israel has accused Hamas of hijacking aid deliveries.

Meanwhile, the World Central Kitchen non-profit says on X that it has “resumed limited hot meal service” at its field kitchen in the central Gaza Strip’s Deir al-Balah following a “five-day halt due to a lack of supplies.”