Oxfam Canada calls again for ceasefire as 500,000 Palestinians face starvation due to Israel aid blockade

Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are teetering on the edge of widespread and catastrophic famine, with 500,000 people currently at risk of starvation, according to a new report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The organization’s latest food security phase analysis found that 93 per cent of the territory’s population, about 1.94 million people, struggle to find enough food to maintain basic nutrition levels, often going hungry for prolonged periods.

Nearly a quarter of a million of those people are already experiencing catastrophic food deprivation as defined by the FAO, putting them in phase five of the organization’s five-phase food security classification and at risk of death.

“The international community must act now. The immediate restoration of access to humanitarian and commercial supplies at scale is critical. Every delay deepens hunger and accelerates starvation, bringing us closer to famine,” said FAO director-general QU Dongyu.

“If we fail to act, we are failing to uphold the right to food, which is a basic human right and the legal protections that uphold it, undermining one of the core principles safeguarding civilian survival,” he said.

Israel has blocked food, medicine, water and fuel from entering Gaza since March 2 and damaged or destroyed 75 per cent of the region’s arable land. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s agricultural wells have also been disabled by Israeli military forces over the last 19 months.

“Gaza’s starvation is not incidental—it is deliberate, entirely engineered, and has now created the largest population facing starvation anywhere in the world—a preventable famine unfolding in real time. It is unconscionable and is being allowed to happen,” said Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s food security and livelihoods coordinator.

“Oxfam staff and partners are witnessing scenes that defy belief: families wasting away from hunger, malnourished children too weak to cry, and entire communities surviving without food or clean water.”

He described Israel’s plan to militarize the delivery of humanitarian aid as an egregious violation of international humanitarian law that could lead to a total collapse of Gaza’s remaining civic infrastructure. 

“Silence in the face of this manmade starvation is complicity,” Alsaqqa said, adding that Oxfam is calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

“The use of food as a weapon of war is a violation of international law,” echoed Oxfam Canada’s deputy director, humanitarian, Dalia Al-Awqati. 

“The world must not stand idly by while Gaza is being starved, and Canada must demonstrate its commitment to international law by using all available measures to demand unfettered humanitarian access.”

The international humanitarian organization is also calling for the release of hostages and unlawfully detained prisoners, an end to the siege of Gaza, unimpeded humanitarian access to the territory and accountability for Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.

Israel seized the Gaza Strip—home to Palestinian families displaced by ethnic cleansing during the creation and expansion of Israel—from Egypt in June of 1967. It later surrounded the 41-kilometre-long territory with a concrete wall. 

Its borders were sealed on Oct. 9, 2023, two days after the militant wing of Hamas killed 1,139 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages. To date, more than 52,862 Gazans have been killed, and another 119,648 have been injured.