For three years, the boxes, flour sacks and hot meals of the UN World Food Programme have kept most of Gaza fed. Now the money is running out. The agency announced on Monday that it can no longer support 1.6 million people a month as it did until September. In October it is down to 1.1 million recipients, chosen among those in greatest need, which leaves about 500,000 Palestinians without WFP food aid.
Those who are still on the list will get less, too. Households now receive a single food parcel where they used to get two, plus a smaller bag of flour. Cash payments to 75,000 families have been trimmed, and daily hot meals across the strip drop by 100,000 to 150,000. Families living close to the line separating the Israeli-held zone from the rest of the strip, where access is difficult, will be served a cooked meal on alternate days only.
Some lifelines survive for now. WFP is still funding bakeries that bake roughly one loaf in three eaten in Gaza, special nutrition for 300,000 mothers and young children keeps flowing, and 200,000 pupils still get a snack at school.
The agency stresses that hunger has eased since the ceasefire of October 2025, but warns that the improvement is thin. Some 1.4 million Gazans, about 67 percent, are still classed at a crisis level of food insecurity or worse, and around 200,000 of them are in an emergency. With unemployment above 80 percent, many families cannot buy vegetables or meat even when markets have them. Only one child in five eats a varied enough diet.
Funding for the Palestinian operation this year is less than half of earlier years; WFP says it needs $450 million to keep its Palestinian programmes running until March; in the West Bank, aid was already halved in September. Acting chief Carl Skau urged donors not to turn their backs now. Israel’s COGAT, the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the territories, insists more aid enters than is needed and denies that people in the strip are going hungry on a large scale.
