At least 700,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are suffering from a critical shortage of food, which could lead to their death, Gaza authorities warned Wednesday.
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Speaking to Al Jazeera television, the head of the Government Information Office in Gaza, Ismail Al-Thawabta, said that residents of the coastal enclave have entered a stage of famine.
Al-Thawabta accused the Israeli army of pursuing a deliberate policy to starve the population in the north, where humanitarian aid is almost impossible to enter due to the blockade and military attacks.
He called on the World Food Program (WFP) to retract its decision taken the day before to suspend food deliveries to the north.
The WFP announced the suspension "until conditions are in place to allow for safe distribution."
Such a decision was not taken lightly, because we know that more people are at risk of starvation, but safety must be ensured to deliver critical food aid, the organization said in a statement.
The institution recalled that deliveries resumed on Sunday after a three-week suspension following the Israeli attack on a truck loaded with vital commodities and due to the absence of a functioning humanitarian reporting system.
On that day the convoy was surrounded by crowds of hungry people near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint and on Monday another caravan faced complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order, he stressed.
Last December, an Integrated Phase Classification report compiled by 15 agencies, including WFP, warned of the risk of famine in northern Gaza by May unless conditions there improved decisively.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's deputy director-general, Beth Bechdol, warned a week ago of famine in Gaza.
In terms of emergency, crisis and catastrophe classifications, "Gaza's 2.2 million people can be considered to fall into all three categories," she said.