WFP reduces aid to 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza for lack of resources

O World Food Programme (WFP) today announced that it will need to reduce its humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip due to lack of resources, leaving 500,000 Palestinians without help on a monthly basis.

The organization also made an appeal, through a communiqué, that the world should not "send away the gaze" of the enclave devastated by war.

“ Families (...) live in extremely difficult humanitarian conditions”, despite the entry into force of a ceasefire a year ago, told AFP news agency Shaun Hughes, director of WFP in Palestinian territories.

The Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave began following the attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas against Israel on 7 October 2023.

About 1.4 million people, of a total of 2.1 million people, “are still in acute food insecurity and need humanitarian aid to survive,” Hughes said, speaking from the offices of the UN agency in Beit Hanina, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

In August 2025, the Integrated Food Safety Phase Classification (IPC), a UN evaluation mechanism, declared the state of hunger in Gaza. Israel, in turn, classified this statement as “lying.”.

In December, the United Nations announced that the territory was no longer considered to be in a state of starvation, thanks to the ceasefire established two months earlier and the increase in the flow of humanitarian aid.

Since then, WFP has been providing “help for about 1.6 million people in the form of food baskets, wheat flour, bread, hot meals, nutritional support, school snacks and cash assistance,” the organization detailed in a statement.

However, the lack of funding now prevents the maintenance of this “support level”.

The WFP says it is “forced” to reduce its food aid by “about a third”, regretting that “half a million people lose access to essential aid”.

“ These are the choices we need to make to ensure that our resources benefit the most vulnerable people and last as long as possible,” Hughes explained.

From now on, 1.1 million Palestinians, among the most vulnerable, will receive monthly food and financial aid, compared to 1.6 million previously.

In addition to this reduction in the number of beneficiaries, the WFP reported that it will also need to reduce the distributed rations by half.

Cash transfers, designed to allow residents to buy food in local trade, have also been reduced.

For 2026, the agency stated that it received less than half of its funding for its operations in the Palestinian territories compared to previous years and estimated that it needed “$450 million” [about €400 million] to keep its activities in Gaza and the West Bank occupied for the next six months.

By early September, the agency had already halved the number of beneficiaries of its assistance in the West Bank — a territory occupied by Israel since 1967 — from 400,000 to 200,000 people.

The WFP also warned of the moment when these cuts occur, which “event on the eve of winter, at a time when the modest improvements observed recently in food safety remain fragile.”.