The Gaza hunger crisis has eased since the October ceasefire but remains severe, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global hunger monitor whose assessments the United Nations relies on. Its most recent report found no part of Gaza still in famine, Phase 5 on the monitor’s five-point scale, yet it placed the entire Strip in an emergency one level below that, with about 1.6 million people, roughly 77 percent of those it could assess, facing crisis-level hunger or worse.
The numbers mark a retreat from the depths of the crisis, when the monitor found over 500,000 people in famine conditions and Israel rejected the finding outright. Aid access has since improved. Israel’s military aid agency, COGAT, says 600 to 800 trucks now enter Gaza daily, with food making up 70 percent of supplies, though Hamas disputes that figure and says the true number is far lower.
Children remain the most exposed
The monitor’s forward projections are the most sobering part of the report. Over the coming year, around 101,000 children between six months and five years old are expected to need treatment for acute malnutrition, more than 31,000 of them for severe cases. Roughly 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women face the same risk. By contrast, the monitor expects the number of people in catastrophic conditions to fall from over 100,000 to around 1,900 by next spring, provided aid keeps flowing at current levels.
That proviso carries weight. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the improvement “fragile, perilously so,” warning that “needs are growing faster than aid can get in.” At the World Food Programme, official Antoine Renard says most people in Gaza now manage two meals a day, a marked change from earlier in the crisis, though he describes reliable, unimpeded access as still an ongoing struggle rather than a settled fact.
Aid groups warn against complacency
Bob Kitchen, a vice president at the International Rescue Committee, puts the warning more starkly, saying hunger across Gaza remains at catastrophic levels regardless of the famine classification, and that the risk of slipping back could return quickly without rapid, unimpeded aid. Guterres has called for more crossings to open, restrictions on critical items to lift, safe internal routes, and funding that holds up over time rather than arriving in short bursts.
Israel’s foreign ministry has pushed back on the broader picture, saying food prices inside Gaza have fallen sharply since July and that the monitor’s data collection has gaps. The dispute over numbers has become a recurring feature of the crisis, with aid agencies and Israeli officials offering different pictures of how much food is actually reaching people who need it.
What is not disputed is the scale of what remains broken. Health care, water and sanitation systems, housing and livelihoods across Gaza are still badly damaged, and the hunger monitor’s own analysts stress that its improved findings describe a ceasefire-era floor, not a recovery.
The Gaza hunger crisis first reached famine classification in August 2025, when the monitor found roughly a fifth of the population in Gaza governorate already in famine and projected the condition would spread to Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis within weeks. That spread did not happen on the scale once feared, aid workers say, largely because the October ceasefire arrived before conditions worsened further across the rest of the Strip.
Whether the current floor holds through the months ahead depends on decisions still being made in capitals far from Gaza itself, from how many crossings stay open to whether funding commitments made during the ceasefire are honoured in full. Aid agencies on the ground say they are planning for both outcomes, scaling up distribution where access allows while warning donors that any lapse could undo months of gradual improvement within weeks. Food-security shocks rarely stay confined to one region: this publication has also reported on how a Gulf shipping disruption is reshaping fertiliser supply chains across Africa, pushing up costs for farmers thousands of miles from Gaza.
