The World Food Programme has cut monthly food support in Gaza from 1.6 million people to 1.1 million, effective October, after funding fell by more than half from 2025 levels. The agency needs more than £300m over the next six months to restore and maintain critical programmes in Palestine. More than a year after a Trump-brokered ceasefire, promised reconstruction has not begun. The numbers describe a population with no economic floor. Eighty percent of Gaza's population is unemployed, according to UN data. Two-thirds face crisis levels of food insecurity (IPC phase three), and 200,000 are at emergency levels (IPC phase four) — one step from famine. One in eight children are chronically malnourished or stunted, with potentially permanent developmental damage, per a recent Unicef survey. The cuts are structural, not temporary. Families receiving ration boxes now get one instead of two. Hot meals from community kitchens have been reduced to every other day. Cash stipends that injected more than £30m a month into Gaza's private sector — underpinning the only functioning market activity — are being scaled back. Even if funding materialised tomorrow, sourcing and shipping ration box ingredients takes roughly three months. Gaza's pre-war food systems have been systematically dismantled. The territory was self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables before the war, but the vast majority of farmland is now occupied by Israel's military. Greenhouse and irrigation infrastructure has been destroyed. The Israeli navy bars fishing boats from coastal waters, eliminating a historically critical protein source. Israel's restrictions on aid shipments compound the funding crisis. Limits on fuel, engine oil, spare parts, and opaque shipping restrictions inflate transport time and costs. Airstrikes have destroyed warehouses, making storage scarce and expensive. Humanitarian operations in Gaza are significantly more costly per unit than comparable operations elsewhere, meaning every dollar of lost funding has an outsized impact on deliveries. The human toll is immediate. Alaa Sarhan, a 40-year-old former paramedic injured by Israeli attacks nearly two decades ago, routinely gives up his food so his five children can eat. Nesreen Muqayed, 50, managing kidney problems and caring for a grandson on the autism spectrum with specific dietary needs, used the last of her flour yesterday. Fruit and vegetables, she says, have become luxuries. The WFP's country director, Shaun Hughes, framed the situation plainly: the humanitarian operation is neither affordable nor sustainable long-term. The gains from a year of large aid shipments that ended a declared famine in summer 2025 are fragile and easily reversed. Without large-scale reconstruction and economic recovery, Gaza remains trapped in permanent emergency — and the international community is now defunding even the emergency response.
