'The worst case scenario of famine is unfolding now in Gaza Strip'

Crisis is likened to the Biafra & Ethiopia disasters | 'Palestinians enduring a catastrophe of epic scale

- BY KEITH FALKINER, ASHLEY COWBURN and DAVE BURKE

THE humanitarian disaster in Gaza is reminiscent of last century's famines in Ethiopia and Nigeria's Biafra region which claimed over two million lives, the UN food agency warned.

The World Food Programme joined warnings that famine is underway in the Gaza Strip.

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

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

Ethiopia's 1983-84 famine killed more than one million people and the famine resulting from the 1967-1970 Biafra war also contributed to over a million deaths.

Smith's comments came after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) warned yesterday that "the worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip".

The IPC, a UN-backed group of organisations used as a monitor to gauge malnutrition, said "immediate, unimpeded" humanitarian access into Gaza was needed to stop more "starvation and death".

Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on March 2 after ceasefire talks broke down. In late May, it began allowing a small trickle of aid to resume, amid warnings of a wave of starvation.

The IPC said its latest data shows that "famine thresholds" have been reached in "most of the Gaza Strip".

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Its alert does not yet amount to an official new famine classification.

But Jean-Martin Bauer, WFP's food security and nutrition analysis director, said it was clear that "indicators have gotten dramatically worse" since the IPC officially warned in May of a "risk of famine" in Gaza.