Gaza death toll surpasses 60,000 as famine ‘unfolding’

GAZA CITY

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 21-month Israel-Hamas war, as a U.N.-backed monitor on July 29 warned that famine is "now unfolding" in Gaza, with thousands of children malnourished and hunger-related deaths on the rise among the youngest.

The Health Ministry in Gaza on July 29 said the bodies of 113 Palestinians, including one killed in an earlier attack, had been brought to hospitals across Gaza in the latest 24-hour reporting period.

The death toll increased to at least 60,034 as of July 29, the ministry said.

Its statement came after a leading international authority on food crises issued a new alert, predicting “widespread death” without immediate action.

"The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip," the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said.

"Immediate, unimpeded" humanitarian access into Gaza was the only way to stop rapidly rising "starvation and death,” it said.

The alert, still short of a formal famine declaration, follows an outcry over images of emaciated children in Gaza and reports of dozens of hunger-related deaths.

The international pressure led Israel over the weekend to announce measures, including daily humanitarian pauses in fighting in parts of Gaza and airdrops.

But the IPC said that air drops over Gaza will not be enough to avert the "humanitarian catastrophe."

The United Nations and Palestinians on the ground also said that little has changed, desperate crowds continue to overwhelm and unload delivery trucks before they can reach their destinations.

The IPC said that Gaza has teetered on the brink of famine for two years, but recent developments have “dramatically worsened” the situation, including “increasingly stringent blockades” by Israel.

A formal famine declaration, which is rare, requires the kind of data that the lack of access to Gaza and mobility within has largely denied. The IPC has only declared famine a few times — in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region last year.

But experts say they don’t need a formal declaration to know what they’re seeing in Gaza.

The U.N.'s World Food Program on July 29 similarly warned that the disaster unfolding in Gaza was reminiscent of last century's famines seen in Ethiopia and Biafra in Nigeria.

"This is unlike anything we have seen in this century," WFP emergency director Ross Smith told reporters in Geneva.

"It reminds us of previous disasters in Ethiopia or Biafra in the past century," he said, speaking via video-link from Rome.