MORE than half a million people in Gaza, a quarter of the population, are starving, according to a report on Thursday by the United Nations and other agencies.

The finding highlights the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s bombardment and siege on the territory in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack.

This comes as the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that the Palestinian death toll had now topped 20,000 people.

The extent of the population’s hunger eclipsed even the near-famines in Afghanistan and Yemen of recent years, according to figures in the report. 

The report warned that the risk of famine is “increasing each day,” blaming the hunger on insufficient aid entering Gaza.

“It doesn’t get any worse’,” said Arif Husain, chief economist for the UN’s World Food Programme. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.”

Hundreds of people lined up on Thursday at a soup kitchen in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, waving cups and pots as they waited for soup to be served from huge vats hanging over wood fires. 

Aya Barbakh, who’s been displaced by the war, said she comes every day for food.

“Let us be in comfort like other people. We see people dying every day and we want to die like them. We have been insulted and humiliated,” she said.

Mahmoud al-Qishawi, from the US charity Pious Projects that runs the kitchen, said there’s no fuel to cook with, so they have to search around the neighbourhood for wood to burn. 

“There’s a huge number of families and we don’t have enough food for them.”

Thursday’s report on the staggering scale of hunger in Gaza underscored the failure of the United States, one of the few remaining allies of Israel, to insist on a ceasefire.

Instead the US have continued, since Monday, to delay a vote on a resolution calling for a halt to combat to allow for desperately needed humanitarian aid. 

The US now says it will support a new resolution that calls “for urgent steps to immediately allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access and also for creating the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.”

The steps are not defined, but diplomats said, if adopted, this would mark the council’s first reference to a cessation of hostilities.

Other security council members are still concerned that the resolution is too weak but, regardless, the Israelis have vowed to continue their assault until Hamas is destroyed, with or without international support.