Famine has been declared in Gaza City
for the first time. The UNbacked
integrated food security phase
classification which monitors world
hunger has just made the formal
declaration. This comes as Israel's
defense minister Israel Katz has
threatened to destroy Gaza city after
Benjamin Netanyahu said the country's
military will expand its offensive
there. Let's bring in our correspondent
in the Middle East, Adam Parsons. Adam,
just tell us more about this
declaration.
So this uh this IPC classification goes
from one to five and it monitors uh and
provides analysis for countries all over
the world. Effectively one is when you
have no worries about your food. When
you get to four, there is a very very
serious shortage of food, but five is
very rarely reached. Uh it is a
threshold that the IPC has uh only
introduced on a few occasions over the
past 20 years. Uh and that indicates
famine. Uh and that is exactly where we
are now is that the IPC is saying that
Gaza the Gaza governorate which is the
area around Gaza city uh now faces
famine. uh that means that among other
things it expects a mortality rate of
two people out of every 10,000 dying uh
every day. It means that death and
destitution uh are seen as commonplace
and it means that there is a widpread
lack of food and starvation. to
emphasize then this is the highest level
uh you can reach and in recent years it
has only been breached in uh Sudan uh
Somalia. This is the first place outside
Africa that has breached this threshold.