Residents in war-ravaged Gaza are selling their possessions for food amid growing starvation, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned Saturday.
"Hunger is present, and famine is looming in Gaza," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X.
Four of five households in northern Gaza and half of the displaced households in the south are going days and nights without eating, said Ghebreyesus.
"This is heartbreaking. This protracted conflict is blocking much-needed access to food and other life-saving humanitarian aid," he wrote.
Ghebreyesus urged the international community for immediate improvement in food security via accelerated flows of aid into Gaza to stop the famine.
The desperate plea comes amid multiple reports that Israel's war is pushing Gaza into famine and a staggering 90% of the people there are on the brink of starvation.
"While over 90% of people in Gaza cannot find their next meal, some U.N. Security Council member states are still toying with words rather than voting for a cease-fire," said Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East and North Africa regional director of U.K.-based anti-poverty organization, Oxfam.
His remarks came after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report published Thursday warned that Gaza faces a serious risk of famine if "intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persist or worsen."
"Gaza's shocking descent into starvation was so predictable as to be premeditated, an ongoing war crime by the Government of Israel," Khalil was quoted as saying in the Oxfam statement.
"This is irrefutable proof that Israel’s attacks have decimated Gaza’s already fragile food system so catastrophically that most people are no longer able to feed themselves and their families. People are being starved in Gaza. Unless there is an immediate ceasefire and a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid, Gaza risks being pushed into a famine," he added.
Khalil further said: "It is abhorrent and barely conceivable in 2023, that women, children and babies, the elderly and sick, the most vulnerable people have had their food weaponized against them."
"The horror felt by a mother unable to feed her child is the horror of Gaza today," he added.
"Those within the international community who have refused to rein in Israel’s military machine and its collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza today stand shamed and complicit – this scandal is on your watch," he said.
"You must no longer patronize this Israeli aggression that is killing so many civilians, even as it fails in its own terms by sowing the seeds of future insecurity for both Palestinians and Israelis alike," he added.
