The World Food Programme said Monday it would end monthly assistance to 500,000 people in Gaza due to a funding shortfall, despite acute needs in the war-battered Palestinian territory.
With the cutbacks, 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza -- still about half the population -- will be receiving either food or cash assistance each month from the UN agency, in reduced amounts.
The World Food Programme said its efforts had mitigated the effects during a famine last year in Gaza -- a description of the situation disputed by Israel -- and warned that conditions had not improved to the point that it can take away aid.
"People are not safe. Airstrikes continue on a daily basis. People continue to be displaced," Shaun Hughes, the WFP country director, told AFP at the agency's office in east Jerusalem.
"Almost everybody remains without a permanent home to live in. And the humanitarian conditions are brutal," he said.
According to the latest assessments, 1.4 million people -- or two-thirds of Gaza's population -- are still "acutely food insecure" and need humanitarian assistance to survive, he said.
In August last year, the UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said that Gaza was suffering famine conditions. Israel, which has blockaded the territory and attacked it relentlessly since the unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on it by Hamas, described the finding as a lie.
The famine classification was lifted in December, two months after a US-brokered ceasefire was announced in Gaza. Israel has kept striking Gaza since then, vowing to kill anyone involved in the October 7 attack.
Since the ceasefire, the WFP has been able to step up assistance and had been reaching between 1.5 million and 1.8 million people every month.
"This has been a lifeline. But now, rather than being able to sustain and scale up that assistance, we're actually having to reduce it," Hughes said.
"And that's not because we don't have humanitarian access to deliver food; that's because we don't have funding."
- Less aid to each recipient -
In addition to reducing the number of people who receive rations, the WFP has been forced to shrink the content.
Families receiving food assistance will now get only one food parcel instead of two and a smaller bag of wheat flour, the WFP said in an operational note.
The 75,000 families who receive assistance in cash will see the amount reduced from 1,250 to 750 shekels ($400 to $240) per month.
The WFP is funded by governments as well as private donors. It has seen a sharp drop in resources, including after President Donald Trump returned to power in the United States and drastically slashed contributions to UN agencies as well as bilateral aid.
The agency says it needs about $450 million over the next six months for its operations in Gaza and the West Bank, but in 2026 it has only received about half the usual financing for the Palestinian territories.
In September, the agency also reduced by half the number of aid recipients in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, from 400,000 to 200,000.
"Now is not the time in the history of Palestine and Gaza to turn away from what is happening in Gaza," Hughes said.
The WFP says that conditions have moderately improved in Gaza but noted that needs could rise again with the onset of winter.
Israel has allowed more goods into Gaza under the terms of the Trump ceasefire but still imposes heavy restrictions, turning away shipments of anything that is seen as having potential military use -- a policy that has included blocking even prosthetic limbs, according to the United Nations.
Israel has ramped up longstanding criticism of the United Nations since the Gaza war, accusing the world body of bias and perpetuating dependency among Palestinians.
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