Blockade puts Gaza on brink of serious food crisis, says UN

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A Palestinian father drives his family car loaded with UN aid food in Gaza City on 1 May 2008

Destitution and food insecurity among Gaza's 1.5 million residents has reached an unprecedentedly critical level, according to unpublished UN findings that they now need "urgent assistance" to avert a "serious food crisis" in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The report revealing that Gaza's population has already passed the internationally-agreed threshold at which it needs concerted measures to prevent a "deterioration in their nutrition" has been drafted on the eve of a donors' conference to discuss Palestinian political and economic prospects in London today.

Showing that Palestinians are having to spend a higher and higher share of their shrinking incomes on food, the findings are that the proportion of Gazan incomes now going on food is 66 per cent – significantly higher than the 61 per cent recorded for Somalia. Seventy per cent of Gazans are at a "deep poverty" income level of $1.20 (60p) per head per day or less.

The joint report from three UN agencies, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the refugee agency UNRWA, points out that this proportion is a "key measure of destitution" because the poorest people in the world spend most of their incomes on food while the richest spend relatively little compared with spending on accommodation, healthcare transport and clothes.

The findings show that levels – which are the highest in the Middle East and reaching 73 per cent among the poorest sectors in Gaza – are not far behind in the West Bank at 58 per cent and that Palestinians in general are "extremely vulnerable" to the recent steep rise in world food prices as well as local factors driven by the Israeli-imposed economic blockade of Gaza.

The report says that half of Gaza's population bought food on credit between January and March 2008 and that one third stopped paying utility bills but that "credit lines are running out". It says that with two thirds of the poorest Palestinians having decreased their expenditure on food "many people are buying lower quality cheaper foods and reducing their consumption of fresh fruit, vegetable and animal protein to save money and also reducing their portion sizes".

Despite the continuing shipment by the Israeli authorities of essential humanitarian goods – including basic food supplies – into Gaza and two to three-monthly food aid distribution to over a million people by UNRWA and the WFP, the report says that global food and fuel price rises, along with specific obstacles faced by the territories now present an "enormous challenge". It adds that "targeted food aid and livelihood support interventions are imperative".

The growing emergency comes on top of the devastation of Gaza's economy by the nine-month closure of crossings to commercial exports and imports, growing fuel shortages, and a warning by John Ging, UNWRA's director of operations in Gaza, to British MPs on Wednesday that it was on the point of an "explosion" which could lead to a repeat of a breakout from the territory.

In Jerusalem the WFP's Kirstie Campbell said the budget for the next two years of food distribution to the Palestinian territories would cost $50m more than planned.

The WFP has already cut a food aid programme to 130,000 farmers in Gaza designed to stop them selling land and other assets as a result of not being able to send out fruit, vegetable and flower exports because of the blockade.

Ms Campbell said last night: "At the moment we are less and less able to assist what is a growing need. Hunger today is widespread in Gaza on the ground and it will not be long before we face a growing problem of malnutrition in Gaza."

Kemal Ajour, whose family's four bakeries in Gaza were forced to shut this week because of a shortage of cooking gas, said overall bread consumption was as much as 40 per cent down on the the period before the first Hamas assumption of office in 2006 and subsequent blockade. Mr Ajour, who employs around 80 workers in the bakeries, said he did not believe his angry and frustrated customers were starving but added: "These actions are not hurting Hamas, which is getting what it needs. They are hurting the ordinary people here."

Fuel distributors in Gaza – whom Israel has accused of deliberately exacerbating serious shortages of diesel and petrol that have severely reduced traffic and created a growing threat of overflowing sewage in Gaza by refusing to distribute existing fuel stocks – said yesterday that they had now emptied the fuel tanks of existing stocks and claimed that it was now up to Israel to replenish them.

The distributors' deputy chairman, Mahmoud Azundar, said that a committee made up of distributors would be meeting over the next few days to allocate priorities of the stocks, which were now in tanks round Gaza, and which he said contained fuel dramatically below what Gaza needed.

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