WFP warns Gaza food insecurity 'will deteriorate' without funding

The UN World Food Program warned on Friday that food insecurity in Gaza will deteriorate without immediate additional funding to sustain humanitarian operations, describing recent improvements as "fragile" despite a modest drop in acute food insecurity numbers. "The situation will deteriorate," Ross Smith, the agency's director of emergency preparedness and response, told Anadolu during a UN briefing in Geneva. Smith said the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report showed the number of people facing acute food insecurity had fallen to 1.4 million from 1.6 million, reflecting about a 10% improvement.

Humanitarian gains 'not recovery'

"But it's critical that these findings are understood correctly. It's not a story of recovery; it's a story that humanitarian assistance is working," Smith said. " It does not mean that our job is done, and it does not mean that people in Gaza are no longer at risk." He stressed that more than 200,000 people remain in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency), particularly in areas near what he described as the "yellow line" and "orange line."

Funding crisis threatens aid

Smith said funding has become "the greatest threat" to food security in Gaza, overtaking humanitarian access constraints. The agency needs more than $420 million to sustain operations across Gaza and the occupied West Bank through the end of the year, according to Smith. WFP has already begun reducing assistance, cutting cash transfers by 25% this month and halving food rations for 220,000 households.

Projections without support

"If we don't get additional support and we have to reduce assistance, then people, the situation will deteriorate," Smith said, adding that updated projections would depend on how conditions develop over the coming months. Without additional funding, WFP will have to make "very significant cuts" to its assistance by October. "Preventing a return to what we saw last year, preventing a return to a famine situation is far less costly, both financially but also in human terms, than trying to pull families back from that situation again," he said.