“The Worst-Case Scenario of Famine is Currently Playing Out in the Gaza Strip”

The 29 July alert from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – the UN-coordinated hunger monitoring system – concludes that Gaza is headed quickly toward famine. Its top expert body, the Famine Review Committee (FRC), called this outcome “inevitable” without urgent intervention. Unable to formally declare or project famine without weeks of additional procedures, the IPC published key data now to prompt immediate action. Current conditions echo those in March 2024, when it warned of “imminent” famine in northern Gaza. Yet this technical debate obscures a simpler truth: Palestinian starvation deaths are accelerating after 21 months of calibrated deprivation.

The alert follows the IPC’s May analysis, which found that the rollout of the U.S.-Israeli militarised distribution system under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would likely deepen starvation but not trigger famine. The FRC added a separate warning that if the untested GHF system failed, it might push Gaza into famine. This second, darker scenario, predicted by Crisis Group and others, is now happening. 

The numbers tell the story. Two of the IPC’s three thresholds for famine have been exceeded. First, nearly one quarter of all households are facing extreme food consumption gaps, up from 4 per cent in April and exceeding the 20 per cent famine requirement. Secondly, acute malnutrition in Gaza City, measured by mid-upper arm circumference, reached 16.5 per cent in early July, surpassing the 15 per cent famine threshold for that method, in a location where food consumption had already reached famine levels. The third criterion – at least two non-violent deaths per 10,000 people daily – remains unmeasured, due to Israeli restrictions, though IPC rules allow it to be inferred. Gaza’s few remaining hospitals have reported dozens of starvation deaths, while summer heat, scarce water and rising diarrhea compound mortality risk. The question is how quickly and how high deaths could spike.

These conditions stem from Israel’s attempt to hold 2.1 million people in open-ended starvation. Since October 2023, Israel has imposed three severe blockades on the long-besieged strip, easing them only after famine warnings (in March 2024, November 2024 and May 2025), then tightening them again. With each reopening too brief for recovery, people enter the next closure weaker than the last – a downward spiral toward collapse. 

By concentrating the GHF’s distributions in southern Gaza, Israel pushed the north toward collapse first. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that food was part of Israel’s strategy to push Gaza’s civilian population to the south, “where they will receive full humanitarian aid”. What they have received instead, in the words of a former GHF contractor, is the opportunity to risk their lives at four “death traps” – distribution sites where Israeli forces violently corral crowds, leading to stampedes for insufficient rations. The north has received even less. 

Netanyahu’s 27 July announcement easing restrictions risks repeating a familiar cycle: offering limited measures under international pressure that quickly prove insufficient. Gaza has reached a tipping point. Only a massive, UN-led humanitarian response enabled by an end to fighting can stem this spiralling horror.