UN food agency to cut aid to 500,000 people in Gaza as funding dries up

The World Food Programme will stop monthly assistance to half a million people in Gaza because of a funding shortfall, the UN agency said on Monday.

The cuts leave 1.1 million Palestinians, around half of Gaza’s population, receiving food or cash each month. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, the WFP had been reaching between 1.5 million and 1.8 million people a month.

“This has been a lifeline. But now, rather than being able to sustain and scale up that assistance, we’re actually having to reduce it,” Shaun Hughes, the WFP’s country director, told AFP in east Jerusalem.

"And that’s not because we don’t have humanitarian access to deliver food; that’s because we don’t have funding."

Smaller rations

Families receiving food will now get one parcel instead of two and a smaller bag of wheat flour. The 75,000 families who receive cash will see monthly payments fall from 1,250 to 750 shekels ($400 to $240).

Hughes said conditions had not improved enough to justify the cuts.

“People are not safe. Airstrikes continue on a daily basis. People continue to be displaced,” he said. “Almost everybody remains without a permanent home to live in. And the humanitarian conditions are brutal.”

According to the latest assessments, 1.4 million people, two-thirds of the population, remain “acutely food insecure” and need aid to survive. The WFP warns that needs could rise again with the onset of winter.

In August 2025, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions in Gaza, a finding Israel called a lie. The classification was lifted in December, two months after the US-brokered ceasefire, though Israeli strikes have continued.

The WFP’s resources have fallen sharply, partly because US President Donald Trump drastically cut contributions to UN agencies. It needs about $450 million over the next six months for Gaza and the West Bank, but has received only around half its usual funding for the Palestinian territories this year. In September, it halved the number of people it helps in the West Bank to 200,000.

Israel has let more goods into Gaza under the ceasefire but still blocks items it considers to have potential military use, including prosthetic limbs, according to the UN. It also accuses the UN of bias.

“Now is not the time in the history of Palestine and Gaza to turn away from what is happening in Gaza,” Hughes said.