UN hunger monitor: mass fatalities are impending due to famine-level shortages in Gaza

According to the global hunger monitor, mass mortality is now inevitable in the Gaza Strip unless there is an immediate truce and a massive influx of food into regions shut off by conflict. In certain sections of the Gaza Strip, food shortages have already gone well beyond famine levels.

Two of its three requirements, the general scarcity of food and the prevalence of malnutrition, were believed to have likely already been reached by the UN-backed Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification, or IPC, which officially classifies famines.

Its third criteria, mortality rates, was not fully supported by available data, but it was assumed that people living in impacted regions would soon be dying from hunger and malnutrition on a famine-scale and that this may already be the case for children under four. Only twice has the 2004-founded organisation declared a famine: in South Sudan in 2017 and in Somalia in 2011.
“Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and is projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024,” the research said. Approximately half of Gaza’s population, or 1.1 million people, were suffering from “catastrophic” food shortages, the worst kind, with some 300,000 people in those places now at risk of mortality rates comparable to those of a famine.
According to the organisation, there’s a chance of starvation in the other regions of Gaza by July.