GAZA (Dispatches) – There is a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of the northern Gaza Strip, a committee of global food security experts has warned, as Israel pursues a military offensive against Palestinian group, Hamas, in the area, Reuters reports.
“Immediate action, within days not weeks, is required from all actors who are directly taking part in the conflict, or have influence on its conduct, to avert and alleviate this catastrophic situation,” the independent Famine Review Committee (FRC) said in a rare alert.
 “If no effective action is taken by stakeholders with influence, the scale of this looming catastrophe is likely to dwarf anything we have seen so far in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023,” the FRC committee said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that there are between 75,000 and 95,000 people still in northern Gaza.
The Famine Review Committee said that it could be “assumed that starvation, malnutrition and excess mortality due to malnutrition and disease, are rapidly increasing” in north Gaza.
“Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future,” it said.
The occupying regime began a wide military push in northern Gaza last month. 
The Famine Review Committee reviews findings by the global hunger monitor – an internationally recognized standard known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
The IPC defines famine as when at least 20 percent of people in an area are suffering extreme food shortages, with at least 30 percent of children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease.
The IPC is an initiative involving UN agencies, national governments and aid groups that sets the global standard on measuring food crises.
The IPC warned last month that the entire Gaza Strip was at risk of famine, while top UN officials last week described the northern Gaza Strip as “apocalyptic” and everyone there was “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence”.
The amount of aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level in a year, according to UN data, and the UN has repeatedly accused the regime of hindering and blocking attempts to deliver aid, particularly to Gaza’s north.
“The daily average number of trucks entering Gaza in late October was about 58 per day,” Jean-Martin Bauer, the UN World Food Programme’s Director of Food Security and Nutrition Analysis, told Reuters on Friday.
“We were getting about 200 a day in September and August, so that’s really a big, big decline,” he said.