UN Security Council Calls for Major Increase in Humanitarian Aid as Gaza Facing Catastrophic Food Insecurity

JERUSALEM, KOMPAS.com – Biscuits and a can of beans, that’s what many Palestinians in Gaza consume to survive.

If they received aid or found donated goods to sell in the market, it was just another stroke of luck.

The risk of famine is increasing every day, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which this week stated that the entire population of Gaza is suffering from catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

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Reporting from the Guardian, this is the highest proportion of the population experiencing acute food insecurity.

On Friday (22/12/2023), the UN security council supported a resolution calling for a major increase in humanitarian aid for Gaza.

But the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, said that the real problem is that the way Israel is carrying out these attacks creates major obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza.

The World Food Program also said it was increasingly difficult to reach people as fighting intensified, food became scarce and expensive, and cooking fuel was hard to come by.

WFP’s latest food security update said the worst situation was in northern Gaza, where 90 percent of people went without food all day and night.

Many Gazans took to social media to vent their frustration over the lack of supplies and high prices, which they say have worsened since the end of a temporary lull in fighting in November.

“After 70 days of war in Gaza, aid finally entered Gaza… for eight people, just these two?” said a man in a video shared by Al Jazeera, holding a tin of beans and a small packet of biscuits.

Also read: Israeli attack in North Gaza kills 110 Palestinians

Maya al-Khadr posted a video on Snapchat showing a box of cheese and eight individually wrapped date cakes she said she gave to her family in Rafah, the southern Gaza region where tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in the past two weeks.

“This is my go-to meal all day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes the distribution is two cans of beans in one day, sometimes none at all, sometimes several cans of tuna. “Many days it’s just biscuits for some people,” he said.

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Food supplies in Gaza are limited due to the siege imposed by Israel since the Hamas attack on October 7 and only a small amount of humanitarian aid enters Gaza through the border with Egypt.

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2023-12-24 06:00:00
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