This winter is likely to deepen hunger for Palestinians in Gaza, after sweeping aid cuts forced the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to end support for more than half a million people each month, the agency’s director for Palestine said. More than a year after a Trump-brokered ceasefire came into force, promised reconstruction has not begun, there are few jobs and the vast majority in Gaza still rely on aid to eat. This summer, WFP programmes helped feed three-quarters of Gaza’s population, about 1.6 million people, but funding has fallen by more than half from 2025 levels.
As a result, from October, aid has been scaled back to 1.1 million people each month. Cuts to deliveries of ration boxes, cash stipends to buy food in markets, and hot meals at community kitchens have already been rolled out. The WFP needs more than £300m over the next six months to restore and maintain critical programmes in Palestine.
A year of large aid shipments ended a famine declared in summer 2025 and reduced the most severe hunger, but without steps to rebuild Gaza’s economy, most families still rely on food handouts. Two-thirds of the population in Gaza face crisis levels of food insecurity, phase three under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which is used to assess if a population is approaching famine. Food insecurity is at emergency levels for 200,000 Palestinians, which means immediate humanitarian supplies are needed to prevent deaths from hunger, Hughes said.
This is IPC phase four, one step away from famine conditions. Young children and their mothers are particularly vulnerable. After enduring years of food shortages, one in eight children in Gaza are chronically malnourished or stunted, a recent Unicef survey found, and may have suffered permanent damage.
Humanitarian aid will be needed at scale until Israel and the international community launch the large-scale reconstruction promised last year. There is no way for most people to feed their own families at present, because about 80% of Gaza’s population is unemployed, according to UN data. This humanitarian operation isn’t affordable or sustainable in the long term,” Hughes said.
They really don’t want to be reliant on these handouts, don’t want to stand in the hot meals queue every day. They want to have some chance of stability and recovery.” Gaza was self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables before the war, but the vast majority of farmland has been occupied by Israel’s military. The sophisticated greenhouse and irrigation systems that supported agricultural production have been destroyed.
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