WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Says Gaza Hunger Will Kill A Large Proportion

The head of the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that a "large proportion" of people in Gaza would die of hunger, describing it as "man-made" during a press conference in Geneva.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, "I don't know how we could call this anything other than people dying of hunger on a mass scale, and it is man-made," as the Gaza Strip’s medical and humanitarian situation worsened.

Action contre la Faim

Le Nouvel Obs framed hunger as the “last weapon of war,” writing that “After bombs and missiles, tank shells, snipers, the last weapon of war has arrived: hunger.”

The same Le Nouvel Obs account said, “The Palestinian enclave no longer survives; it is now dying,” tying the crisis to the collapse of the enclave’s ability to sustain life.

A Le Nouvel Obs narrative said that, “According to UN criteria, the famine threshold has been crossed in part of the Palestinian enclave,” and described hunger as a process that can become fatal when the body can no longer repair itself.

The article quoted a doctor’s explanation that “One does not die of hunger. One dies when the body, deprived of resources, derails and can no longer repair itself.”

Al-Jazeera Net

In parallel, annahar reported that the Global Food Crises 2026 report “confirms famine declarations in parts of Gaza during 2025,” while adding that “famine risk remains in 2026.”

annahar also put numbers on the crisis after the ceasefire announced on October 10, 2025, saying that “in the period from December 1, 2025 to April 15, 2026, about 1.6 million people in Gaza remained in Crisis or worse.”

As hunger deepened, Al-Jazeera Net described displaced Palestinians in Gaza Strip refugee camps turning “small, unused plots around their tents into miniature agricultural plots” to secure “the minimum food for their children.”

“Thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza Strip refugee camps are turning the small, unused plots around their tents into miniature agricultural plots in an urgent effort to secure the minimum food for their children and to cope with the staggering rise in prices of basic goods”

Al-Jazeera Net

In al-Zawaida in central Gaza, Abu Khoder said, "We, in this displacement, had to rent a small plot of land beside our tent to plant there and rely on it; if we could obtain three tomatoes a day, they would make a salad for the family, and the eggplants you see, we take one or two of them for breakfast."

The same report said the Gaza Ministry of Agriculture confirmed these initiatives reflect “near-total destruction” of the agricultural sector and that “the occupation currently controls more than 63% of the arable land in the sector.”

It added that the occupation destroyed and uprooted about 4 million fruit trees since the war began, while Gaza Government Information Office data said the occupation destroyed more than 94% of the agricultural land, covering about 178,000 dunams, collapsing agricultural production from 405,000 tons annually to about 28,000 tons only.