The “worst-case scenario” is unfolding in Gaza.

Though there are larger hunger crises in the world in terms of sheer numbers, Gaza is, in many ways, the most intense. By September, leading humanitarian groups predict, 100 percent of the population will face acute food insecurity, meaning they will be forced to routinely skip meals. Half a million people will be facing starvation, destitution, and death. There’s little agriculture in today’s Gaza, next to no commercial trade with the outside world, and no opportunity for people to flee.

The situation has deteriorated sharply in recent weeks: Of the 74 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza in 2025, 63 occurred in July — including 24 children under 5, according to the World Health Organization. “The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” the world’s leading hunger watchdog declared on Tuesday. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the consortium of humanitarian groups that monitors and classifies global hunger crises, warned that “widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths.”

Israel has been waging war in Gaza since Hamas’s deadly attack in October 2023, but the territory’s suffering this month has grown even more severe, more suddenly, for more people than at any other turn in the conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to claim this week, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there is “no starvation in Gaza.” That stance has gotten harder to maintain amid increasing media attention, with photos of emaciated children spread across the covers of newspapers around the world.

The Israeli government has made some policy changes, including instituting daily 10-hour “humanitarian pauses” in some areas, air-dropping some additional aid, and allowing in more food trucks. But aid groups say these measures don’t come close to meeting the scale of the problem.

So how did the situation get this bad, and what can be done, at this point, to keep it from getting worse?

How a problem became a crisis

Some human rights groups have accused Israel of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, which is illegal under international law. Netanyahu has denied that this is the policy, though some politicians in Israel, and

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