SAEDNEWS: The United Nations food agency has reduced humanitarian assistance to more than 700,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank due to a lack of funding.
According to Saednews, The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has significantly reduced food assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank due to a critical funding shortage, warning that humanitarian conditions in Gaza remain “absolutely brutal.”
Carl Skau, the WFP’s acting executive director, said the agency reduced the number of people receiving assistance in Gaza from 1.6 million to 1.1 million this month. In the occupied West Bank, beneficiaries have been cut in half, from 400,000 to 200,000.
Skau called on the international community to provide $450 million in urgent funding to restore assistance and maintain the distribution of hot meals and food parcels across both territories over the next six months.
According to the WFP, food rations in Gaza have been reduced by 50 percent. Families still receiving assistance will now receive one food parcel instead of two, along with a smaller quantity of wheat flour.
Daily hot-meal distribution has also declined from 250,000 to 150,000. People living in hard-to-reach areas near the so-called “yellow line” are receiving meals only every other day. Meanwhile, cash assistance has been reduced for 75,000 families.
Despite the financial constraints, the agency continues to support bakeries that meet approximately one-third of Gaza’s bread requirements, provide nutritional assistance to around 300,000 women and children, and distribute school snacks to 200,000 children. However, these operations remain under mounting pressure.
Speaking to UN correspondents from occupied Jerusalem after visiting Gaza and the West Bank, Skau said UN teams had recorded approximately 50 attacks per day in Gaza over the preceding week, according to Press TV.
Although the WFP has helped prevent a further deterioration toward famine since the October 2025 ceasefire, the humanitarian situation remains critical. An estimated 1.4 million people—around 67 percent of Gaza’s population—continue to experience crisis-level food insecurity or worse. Approximately 200,000 people urgently require food assistance to prevent death from starvation.
Skau emphasized that the reductions stem not from declining humanitarian needs or access difficulties alone, but from a lack of funding. The WFP has received less than half the funding for its Palestine operations in 2026 compared with previous years.
Israeli restrictions have further complicated the situation. Last week, the Israeli military temporarily suspended the entry of commercial goods, including food, into Gaza. Although it subsequently announced plans to resume coordinating commercial truck deliveries, it warned that merchants could lose their licenses if they were found to have paid taxes to Palestinian authorities.
Under the reduced assistance program, the WFP will prioritize people living closest to the yellow line, as well as sick individuals, mothers and children vulnerable to malnutrition.
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, escalating attacks by Israeli settlers have intensified an already prolonged human-rights and protection crisis, pushing more Palestinians toward hunger, Skau said. Food insecurity in the territory has more than doubled over the past three years, with nearly one million Palestinians now in need of food assistance.
