WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – A top UN official says that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.
Cindy McCain, the director of the UN World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine.
“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday. “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”
She said a ceasefire and a greatly increased flow of aid through land and sea routes was essential to confronting the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, home to 2.3 million people.
The panel that serves as the monitor for food crises said earlier this year that northern Gaza was on the brink of famine and likely to experience it this month. The next update will not come before this summer.
One of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s humanitarian officials in Gaza told The Associated Press that on-the-ground preparations for a new sea route were on track to bring in more food — including treatment for hundreds of thousands of starving children — by early or mid-May.  
Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance groups carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Zionist regime has so far killed at least 34,596 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 77,816 others.
The Israeli offensive has left 85 percent of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60 percent of the territory’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.