World Food Programme cuts Gaza food assistance by about a third, citing funding shortfall

The World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations food agency, announced on Monday that a shortage of funds has forced it to cut food assistance to families in the Gaza Strip by roughly one third. The agency said the cut will affect some 500,000 people as winter approaches.

WFP said it is supporting 1.1 million of the most vulnerable people in Gaza this month, down from 1.6 million in September. Since the October 2025 ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas fighters, the agency said, its teams had reached around 1.6 million people a month with food parcels, wheat flour, bread, hot meals, nutrition support, school snacks and cash assistance. It said its food assistance “has provided a lifeline for up to 90 per cent of families in Gaza” over the past three years.

Rations have been cut in half, WFP said. Families will now receive one food parcel instead of two, and a smaller bag of wheat flour. The value of cash assistance given to 75,000 families has been reduced. The number of hot meals provided daily across Gaza will fall from 250,000 to 150,000. Families in hard-to-reach areas, including those near the yellow line of Israeli military control, will receive a hot meal every other day instead of daily.

For now, WFP said, it can keep supporting bakeries that cover a third of Gaza's bread needs. It can also keep giving nutrition assistance to 300,000 women and children and healthy school snacks to 200,000 students.

The agency gave these figures on hunger. Roughly 67 per cent of Gazans, an estimated 1.4 million people, are in acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse. That is down from 77 per cent at the end of 2025. Some 200,000 people remain in emergency conditions and need immediate food assistance to prevent them from dying from hunger. More than 80 per cent of the population is unemployed, and only one in five children eats a sufficiently diverse diet. WFP warned that gains since October 2025 “remain fragile and could quickly be reversed if humanitarian funding continues to decline”.

Carl Skau, WFP's acting executive director, spoke to journalists from Jerusalem, according to UN News reports in French and Arabic. As the French report relays it, he said the cuts are not happening because needs are falling or because food cannot be delivered, but only because money is short. He called for lifting restrictions on the entry of vital goods, including items classed as dual use, and for markets to work again.

WFP said its funding for operations in Palestine in 2026 is less than half of what it received in previous years. It said it urgently needs $450 million to maintain critical operations in Gaza and the West Bank through March. It also said that in September it halved the number of people it assists in the West Bank, from 400,000 to 200,000.

The source items do not say which donors have reduced contributions, or how much money WFP has received this year. WFP is a UN agency, and the items are published by UN News, the organisation's own news service.