Gaza faces the threat of famine

Nearly 166 million people worldwide are estimated to need urgent action against hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global partnership which measures food insecurity.

More than one million of Gaza's inhabitants face the most extreme form of malnutrition - classified by the IPC as 'Catastrophe or Famine.'

Seven-month-old Majd Salem is one of them. Born on Nov. 1, three weeks after Israel launched the offensive, the child was being treated for a chest infection in the neonatal ICU at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza on May 9.

The nurse caring for him said he was suffering from severe malnutrition. Majd was born at a healthy weight of 3.5 kg (7.7 pounds), said his mother, Nisreen al-Khateeb.

By May, when he was six months old, his weight had barely changed to 3.8 kg, she said - around 3 kg less than would be expected for a baby his age. Majd, whose eyes keenly followed visiting reporters in the ward, had to be given antibiotics for the infection and fortified milk to boost his weight, his mother said. Reuters was unable to trace them after May 21, when the hospital was evacuated following an Israeli raid. One in three children in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished or suffering from wasting, according to the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, citing data from its partners on the ground.

Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the government media office, said their records showed 33 people had died of malnutrition in Gaza including 29 children, but added that the number could be higher.

The plight of Gaza's children is part of a bigger trend. Globally last year more than 36 million children under 5 were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely, according to the Global Report on Food Crises, a collaborative analysis of food insecurity by 16 international organizations. The food shortage in Gaza, while particularly widespread, comes amid a broader spike in extreme hunger as conflicts around the world intensify.

Two other countries - South Sudan and Mali - each have thousands of people living in zones listed on the IPC website as facing famine. Another 35 - including Sudan, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo - have many people in the IPC's next-most acute category of food deprivation.

The IPC, a grouping of United Nations agencies, national governments and non-governmental organizations, is expected to update its assessment of the picture in war-torn Sudan in coming weeks. A preliminary projection reported by Reuters earlier this month said as many as 756,000 people in Sudan could face catastrophic food shortages by September. Gaza's hunger crisis is also a product of war.