WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A quarter of people in the Israeli-occupied territories live with food insecurity, including 34 percent of the children in the occupied territories, a new report has revealed. 
The Alternative Poverty Report issued by the nonprofit organization Latet revealed that 28.7 percent of Israelis – 2,756,000 people – including 39.6 percent of children, live in poverty, warning that families in the lower middle class face the risk of deteriorating into poverty.
The report indicated that the economic situation of 65 percent of families who receive support from charitable organizations had deteriorated during the past year, and half of the families receiving this support were forced to give up formula milk, or to consume less than the recommended amounts while 80 percent of families did not have the money to buy enough food.
A whooping 70.8 percent of citizens receiving support from charitable organizations said they had to give up buying necessary medications or medical treatment due to their economic situation.
In light of the economic hardship of the past year, 70.9 percent of charities that distribute food reported a decline in donations, while the minimum cost of living for a family of two parents and two children rose by 6.9 percent in that period, from 12,735 shekels ($3,535)  to 13,617 ($3,780) shekels this year.
According to the Multidimensional Poverty Measure (MPM), which takes into account several factors in order to measure whether a family lives in poverty or serious poverty, the expenditure of families who receive support is 1.7 times higher than their monthly income, and 78.8 percent of these families have debts, while this percentage drops to 26.9 percent among the population as a whole.
In light of the economic hardship, 69.5 percent of the supported families were forced to give up repairing serious damage to their homes. While 84.8 percent suffer from “energy shortages” and face difficulties in heating their homes in winter and cooling them in summer.
The electricity was cut off from 22.1 percent of the supported families in the last year, due to non-payment of the electricity bill.
As many as 22.8 percent of children in these families dropped out of school.