U.S. official: famine has begun in northern Gaza

JERUSALEM>> Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told lawmakers this week that a famine is underway in the northern Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by six months of Israeli military operations and is the part of the territory most cut off from aid.

Power’s statement was significant as it made her the first senior U.S. official to identify the hunger crisis in Gaza publicly as a famine. But her agency, known as USAID, later sought to temper Power’s comments, clarifying that her assessment was based on data collected in

March, not on new information.

“While there has not been a new assessment, conditions remain dire,” USAID said in a statement Thursday.

Aid agencies and global experts have warned for months that nearly all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza soon would face extreme hunger.

Power, whose comments came during a congressional testimony Wednesday, was citing a March report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, a group of U.N. agencies and relief agencies also known as the IPC, the USAID statement said.

That report said northern Gaza, the first part of the territory that Israeli forces invaded in October, could tip into famine between mid-march and May. The northern part of the enclave has been damaged heavily by the war and is far from the two open border crossings in the south through which nearly all aid is arriving.

The IPC usually classifies a food shortage as a famine when at least 20% of households face an extreme lack of food, when at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition and when at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.

Power said later in her testimony that the rate of severe malnutrition among children in Gaza had become “markedly

worse” since Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led terrorist attack prompted Israel to launch its military offensive in Gaza.

“In northern Gaza, the rate of malnutrition prior to Oct. 7 was almost zero, and it is now one in three kids,” she said. She added: “In terms of actual severe acute malnutrition for under-5s, that rate was 16% in January and became 30% in February.”

People in northern Gaza have described severe food shortages. Even in Beit Lahia, once known as Gaza’s breadbasket, people’s diets sometimes amount to little more than boiled bitter weeds, said Yousef Sager, 24, a farmer. “I never thought we would be talking about famine here,” he said.