HAMILTON, Canada

A senior World Food Programme (WFP) official warned Monday that the Gaza Strip is facing an "astonishing" level of hunger, with a quarter of the population enduring famine-like conditions.

"The hunger crisis in Gaza has certainly reached new and astonishing levels of desperation," Ross Smith, director of Emergency Preparedness and Response at WFP, said in a virtual news conference, adding that "a third of the population are not eating for multiple days in a row."

"A quarter of the population is facing famine-like conditions," Smith added.

Saying that more than "almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible," he stressed that "at the moment, the markets are non-functional, and nothing is really moving inside Gaza."

"These minimum operating conditions include more than 100 trucks a day that we need to move in order to have sufficient scale to alleviate the desperation that's there," he said, noting that only 10% of needed trucks have entered since mid-May.

Commenting on rising starvation-related deaths, Smith said: "We hear reports of people that are starving to death and we certainly have the numbers of people that are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. So certainly we have evidence of the severity of the situation."

He also addressed a recent tragedy involving a WFP convoy, and stated: "Yesterday's incident is one of the greatest tragedies we've seen for our operations in Gaza and elsewhere while we're trying to work. And it's completely avoidable and it's an absolute tragedy."

Smith further reaffirmed that all UN movements and positions are all known by Israeli authorities.

Earlier in the day, the Gaza Health Ministry said that 99 Palestinians were killed and over 650 injured while trying to get humanitarian aid in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed while seeking aid to 1,021, with over 6,511 others wounded since May 27.

Israel has killed more than 59,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, collapsed the health system, and led to severe food shortages.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.