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“Full-blown famine” is present in the northern part of Gaza and is spreading south, said Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme.
“What I can explain to you is that there is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” McCain told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview to air on Sunday.
McCain’s comments are not an official declaration of famine, which must meet certain criteria, but she said it’s based on what WFP employees have seen and experienced in Gaza.
“It’s horror,” she added.
Although it is the first time that the head of the WFP has labeled the situation in Gaza a famine, international organizations have danced around the label for months as the starvation in Gaza has grown more acute. But as historian Yan Slobodkin wrote for Slate, whether or not the severe starvation that’s happening in Gaza is officially declared a famine is, from a humanitarian perspective, irrelevant:
Three points can help make sense of the conversation. The first is that the threshold for declaring famine is arbitrary. There is no clear line between when famine is imminent and when it begins. The second point is that famine is best understood not as an event, but as a process with mass mortality as its culmination. The third point is that declarations of famine are always contested.
Israel has inflicted staggering levels of destruction and suffering on Gaza in its retaliatory assault after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which killed 1,200 people. The IDF’s relentless bombing campaign has destroyed Gaza’s agricultural lands, critical infrastructure and large swaths of housing. More than 34,000 people in Gaza have been killed, the majority of them women and children, and over 10,000 more are believed to be buried under the rubble.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement this week that it could take up to three years to retrieve the bodies with the tools on hand.
As people in Gaza starve, Israeli officials have continued to restrict humanitarian aid shipments and to subject deliveries to excessive waits at checkpoints. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, has accused Israel of using starvation as a “weapon of war.”
The humanitarian crisis is especially dire in north Gaza, where people have resorted to eating grass and animal feed, NPR reported. At least 32 people have died of malnutrition and dehydration in the north, 28 of whom were children, the Gaza Health Ministry said.