What happened
The IPC is the same methodology used to declare famine in Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen — a technical classification system, not a political or advocacy body, that requires specific thresholds across food consumption, malnutrition, and mortality data to be met before the word 'famine' is used at all. Its own guidelines treat a famine declaration as a last resort precisely because of how rarely the evidentiary bar is cleared; this was the first time it had ever applied that label anywhere in the Middle East.
The path to the famine ran through Israel's own stated policy choices. From early March 2025, Israel imposed an 11-week total blockade on all aid entering Gaza — no food, fuel, or medical supplies of any kind — which the Israeli government described as pressure to force Hamas into a new hostage deal. When it partially eased the blockade in late May 2025, it did so by replacing the UN-led aid distribution system with the new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (see the separate entry on aid-site killings in this file), a system the UN itself declined to participate in over safety and neutrality concerns.
Israel's rejection of the IPC findings centred on COGAT's (the Israeli military body governing access to Gaza) characterisation of the underlying data sources as compromised by Hamas influence. The IPC's technical committee — which includes FAO, WFP, and other UN agencies plus independent food security experts — did not withdraw or revise its finding in response. By December 2025, after the October ceasefire improved aid flows, the IPC found famine conditions had eased but noted the situation remained 'highly fragile,' with 100,000 people still in Phase 5 catastrophic conditions — underscoring that the famine's end was a direct product of the same aid-flow policy that had caused it, reversed under the ceasefire's terms.