“We have come to depend on the lunch meal distributed by the charitable kitchen, which is the only meal we eat throughout the day and barely enough to sustain us.”
The United Nations agency cited “funding shortages” for its decision, adding that the move would “reduce food assistance in Gaza by around one-third: half a million people will lose access to critical assistance.”
The funding cut comes at a time when the situation in the Gaza Strip has been described as catastrophic, particularly as winter approaches and Palestinians continue to endure harsh conditions in fragile tents amid severe Israeli restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.
WFP said that its aid had been a lifeline for 90 percent of families in Gaza. Since the so-called ceasefire, which went into effect in October 2025, WFP had supported “1.6 million people every month with food parcels, wheat flour, bread, hot meals, nutrition support, school snacks and cash assistance.”
With the funding cut, the agency will now only be supporting 1.1 million people.
“The number of hot meals WFP provides has been reduced from 250,000 to 150,000 a day,” it said. “Families living in hard-to-reach areas, including near the yellow line of Israeli military control, will receive a hot meal every other day instead of daily.”
WFP highlighted the extent of the Israeli-engineered crisis in the enclave:
An estimated 1.4 million people, or 67 percent of Gaza’s population, are experiencing acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, classified as Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Phase 3 or above.
Around 200,000 people remain in Emergency conditions (IPC Phase 4) where immediate food assistance is needed to prevent deaths from hunger.
Only one in five children consumes a sufficiently diverse diet. Access to health, water, sanitation and hygiene services also remains limited.
The agency said that it was falling well short of the funding it needed to sustain its current level of support in the Palestinian territories: “The agency urgently requires USD 450 million to maintain critical operations in Gaza and the West Bank over the next six months, from October 2026 to March 2027.”
Hunger in Gaza
Just last week, the Gaza Health Ministry and the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights published reports documenting the catastrophic levels of hunger experienced by people in Gaza and the extreme difficulty they face in securing meals for their families.
According to the Health Ministry, an estimated 74,200 children will require treatment for acute malnutrition by April 2027, while one in every three pregnancies is classified as high-risk because of inadequate nutrition among expectant mothers.
The WFP announcement is bound to worsen an already calamitous situation as the Israelis continue to restrict the entry of aid and other essentials into the enclave. To tighten their grip on Palestinians further, Israeli authorities announced a ban on the entry of commercial goods last Wednesday, thereby reducing the availability of essential items even for the few who could afford to buy them.
“It’s a disaster! What are we going to do with these reduced rations? How will we feed our little ones?” Mervat al-Satari, a displaced Palestinian mother of five living in a camp in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, told the BBC after learning of the WFP announcement. “Sometimes, we rely on these meals as our only food.”
Sawsan Bahloul, another displaced Palestinian woman from al-Mawasi and a mother of three, told the BBC that the reduction in aid would have a severe impact on her family. “This will affect us a lot. The daily aid was somehow ticking the box, but now it will come every two days,” she said.
Bahloul added that the portions distributed by the community kitchen typically consisted of pasta or lentils, with potatoes and aubergines occasionally included, and were already too small to feed her family.
Similar sentiments were expressed by a mother in last week’s Al Mezan hunger report. “There are days when we suffer from hunger and my children have nothing to eat,” she said. “We have come to depend on the lunch meal distributed by the charitable kitchen, which is the only meal we eat throughout the day and barely enough to sustain us.”
In their push to force Palestinians off their land to make way for Jews-only settlements, the Israelis continue to kill them with impunity and make life hell for those who survive their killing machine, ensuring that the survivors struggle to eat, drink, and find adequate shelter in the dystopian hellscape to which they have reduced nearly the entire Gaza Strip. — Palestine Will Be Free
