WFP cuts aid to Gaza: half a million people left without assistance

The World Food Programme has announced significant cuts to its operation in Gaza due to funding shortfalls, leaving approximately 500,000 people without the critical support they had been receiving until now. The United Nations agency has received less than half of the funds raised in previous years for the same operation, and has described the need for new resources as urgent.

The concrete effect of the cuts can be measured in the numbers of direct assistance. The number of monthly beneficiaries of the operation will drop from 1.6 to 1.1 million people. Distributed rations will be halved, and hot meals provided daily will fall from 250,000 to 150,000. This is a reduction that comes as, according to data reported by WFP itself, approximately 1.4 million people — 67% of Gaza’s population — already live in a condition of acute food insecurity or worse.

The news comes from the statement released by WFP and finds independent confirmation in the reporting of two international outlets, one of which also cites the Reuters agency among its sources; this is therefore information that meets the two-distinct-source criterion required for claims of this kind, based on institutional United Nations data.

The context in which the announcement comes is that of an area approaching a new winter of humanitarian crisis, a year after the agreement that halted the most intense hostilities in the Strip. The cuts announced by WFP concern precisely basic food assistance, the tool on which the daily survival of hundreds of thousands of families who have no other sources of income or supply depends.

The World Food Programme did not indicate, in the documentation released, a date by which it expects to close the funding gap reported, nor a list of the donors from whom it expects the additional funds needed to bring the operation back to previous levels.