GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – The UN World Food Program (WFP) has raised the alarm on the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip amid a genocidal Israeli war, saying children are starving to death in the besieged Palestinian territory.
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain made the remarks in an interview with CNN, as the Tel Aviv regime has been using food as a weapon of war and deliberately blocking aid deliveries to Gaza over the past six months.
Asked about the impact of food shortage in Gaza, especially for children, McCain replied, “Well, children are dying as we speak.”
“And those that are not dying or haven’t died yet are so emaciated and lacking so much in the way of important nutrients at this particular time in their life cycles, they won’t -- if they do live, they will never recover from it,” she added. 
She also warned that Gaza is “literally on the brink of going over the edge, over the cliff with famine and not being able to recover from it.”
The WFP chief further stressed the importance of opening Gaza’s crossings closed by Israel, saying the agency has food for 1.1 million people for three months amassed on the border and just needs to be let into the territory.
“People are desperate,” she said. “We, as humanitarians, must be able to get in with our humanitarian principles and deliver aid in such a way.”
Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Hamas resistance movement carried out its historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
So far, the occupying regime has killed at least 33,175 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 75,886 others.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said more than 1.7 million Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes since the outbreak of the war on Gaza. 
In a post on X, the UN body said: “Six months of never-ending displacement. Around 1.7 million people have been forced to flee their homes”.
“Since the onset of the war, UNRWA facilities have been transformed to provide emergency shelter for thousands of families seeking safety with nowhere to go,” it added.
The UN-backed report had warned of an “expected and imminent” famine in northern Gaza, explaining that the number of people in the Palestinian territories facing “catastrophic levels” of hunger has nearly doubled since last December.