Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied there is hunger in Gaza, calling reports of starvation “lies” promoted by Hamas.
Famine occurs when these conditions are met
The IPC was first set up in 2004 during the famine in Somalia. It includes more than a dozen United Nations agencies, aid groups, governments and other bodies.
Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip.Credit: AP
Famine can appear in pockets, sometimes small ones, and so a formal classification requires caution.
The IPC has only confirmed famine a few times – in Somalia in 2011, and South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and last year in parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region. This is the first confirmed famine in the Middle East.
It rates an area as in famine when all three of these conditions are confirmed:
- 20 per cent of households have an extreme lack of food, or are essentially starving.
- At least 30 per cent of children six months to five years old suffer from acute malnutrition, based on a weight-to-height measurement; or 15 per cent of that age group suffer from acute malnutrition based on the circumference of their upper arm.
- At least two people, or four children under five, per 10,000 are dying daily due to starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
Gaza’s been a major challenge
Gaza has posed a major challenge for experts because Israel severely limits access to the territory, making it difficult to gather data.
In a separate report on Friday, the Famine Review Committee, or FRC, said it, too, had concluded there was famine in part of Gaza. The FRC is a group of independent international food security experts regularly consulted by the IPC.
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The group acts as an added layer of verification when the data shows there could be famine.
The data analysed between July 1 and August 15 showed clear evidence that thresholds for starvation and acute malnutrition have been reached. Gathering data for mortality has been harder, but the IPC said it is reasonable to conclude from the evidence that the necessary threshold has likely been reached.
It’s not always clear that hunger is the cause of death
Most cases of severe malnutrition in children arose through a combination of lack of nutrients along with an infection, leading to diarrhoea and other symptoms that caused dehydration, said Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine and executive director of the World Peace Foundation.
“There are no standard guidelines for physicians to classify cause of death as ‘malnutrition’ as opposed to infection,” he said.
When famine occurs, there are often relatively few deaths from hunger alone. Far more people die from a combination of malnutrition, disease and other forms of deprivation. All of these count as excess deaths – separate from violence – that can be attributed to a food crisis or famine, he said.
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