World Food Programme to suspend aid to Palestinians due to funding shortage
‘WFP would have to start suspending assistance to over 200,000 people’
Gaza: The World Food Programme (WFP) will suspend food aid to over 200,000 Palestinians from next month due to a "severe" shortage of funds, the group's senior official for the Palestinian territories said on Sunday.
"In light of the severe funding shortages, WFP is forced to make painful choices to stretch the limited resources," Samer Abdeljaber, the WFP's country director, he told Reuters by phone from Jerusalem.
"WFP would have to start suspending assistance to over 200,000 people, which is 60 percent of its current case load, from June." The most impacted families are in Gaza, where food insecurity and poverty are the highest, and in the West Bank.
The United Nations agency offers impoverished Palestinians both monthly vouchers with a value of $10.30 per person and food baskets. Both programs will be affected.
Gaza is home to 2.3 million people, of which 45 percent are unemployed and 80 percent depend on international aid, according to Palestinian and UN records.
"WFP understands the implications of this unavoidable and hard decision on hundreds of thousands of people who also depend on food assistance for their most basic needs," said Abdeljaber.