WFP drops 500,000 people in Gaza from monthly food aid, citing funding shortages

Oct. 19, 2026, 8:39 a.m. ET

The United Nations World Food Programme said on Monday, Oct. 19, that funding shortages have forced it to reduce food assistance in Gaza by around one-third, and that "half a million people will lose access to critical assistance."

"From this month, WFP is supporting 1.1 million of the most vulnerable people in Gaza with food and cash assistance, down from 1.6 million last month," the agency said in a news release. Since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, WFP said, it had been reaching around 1.6 million people every month, and it "no longer has sufficient funding to sustain this level of support."

"As of this month, we're now cutting half a million people from the number of people that we're assisting," Shaun Hughes, the WFP country director, told AFP.

WFP said it has cut food rations by half, so families receiving food assistance will get one food parcel instead of two and a smaller bag of wheat flour. The number of hot meals it provides has been reduced from 250,000 to 150,000 a day, and families in hard-to-reach areas, including near the yellow line of Israeli military control, will receive a hot meal every other day instead of daily. It has also reduced the value of cash assistance provided to 75,000 families, the agency said.

An estimated 1.4 million people, or 67 percent of Gaza's population, are experiencing acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, according to WFP, down from 1.6 million people, or 77 percent, at the end of 2025. WFP said around 200,000 people remain in emergency conditions, where immediate food assistance is needed to prevent deaths from hunger.

WFP said it received less than half as much funding for its Palestine operation in 2026 as in previous years, and that it urgently requires $450 million to maintain critical operations in Gaza and the West Bank from October 2026 to March 2027.

"We tell the world now is not the time to look away. This is the time to step up to sustain this support, to protect the progress that has been made, but also to push for early recovery," Carl Skau, WFP's acting executive director, told Reuters in Gaza. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office described the WFP announcement as "catastrophic" and said it might accelerate famine in the enclave, Reuters reported.