The UN's World Food Programme announced on Monday that it would need to cut aid to roughly half a million people in Gaza due to a funding shortfall.
The cuts come as winter approaches and recent improvements in food security remain fragile.
“I want to be clear: this is not because the needs are going down, and it's not because we aren't able to bring in the food,” Carl Skau, acting executive director of WFP, said. “This is only because we have less funding.”
Mr Skau described the situation in Gaza as “absolutely brutal” and said that WFP was seeking $450 million in funding to help those in need over the next six months.
“People are living in flimsy makeshift shelters, or their destroyed homes among sewage and piles of garbage,” he told reporters during a briefing. “They line up with buckets at water trucks to get the clean water they need for the day. There are no jobs, no way of making an income.”
Over the past three years, WFP has provided aid services for up to 90 per cent of families in Gaza, and since the October 2025 ceasefire has been reaching about 1.6 million people every month with parcels and other food aid. Mr Skau said WFP is also supporting about 80 per cent of bakeries in the enclave.
But funding cuts mean hundreds of thousands will lose access to the programme.
“We will do our best to prioritise those in most need – this is not an easy exercise,” Mr Skau said, adding that services are likely to be focused on the sick, children at risk of malnutrition and those “whose safety is at risk and who are often pushed to move”.
He added that a sense of hopelessness has begun to take root in the enclave, where UN teams have recorded up to 50 air strikes and other attacks per day over the past week.
“People are beginning to lose hope. There was hope at the start of the ceasefire, still also in January, February, that things would change for the better ... and I think now there is this sense of a standstill,” Mr Skau said. “Many I spoke to feel forgotten by everyone.”
In the West Bank, where Israeli settler violence has skyrocketed in recent months, the WFP chief said the situation was turning dire.
The annual olive harvest has become a flashpoint for confrontations between settlers and Palestinian farmers. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled) recorded an average of 39 incidents a day from October 1 to October 9, compared with around 20 per day in September.
The latest violence comes amid planned settlement expansion in the West Bank, with the government approving dozens of new settlements and legalising numerous outposts. Mr Skau said that settler attacks in the past two weeks surpassed the whole of last year in terms of number of attacks.
“This used to be a human rights and protection crisis – and primarily it's still a human rights and protection crisis – but it's now also becoming a hunger crisis because food insecurity has more than doubled in the last three years,” he explained. “Almost a million Palestinians now need food assistance, and yet also in the West Bank, we are now forced to cut back.”