Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said there was a “total famine” in northern Gaza.
“When conflicts like this, when emotions run high and things happen in war, hunger happens,” McCain said during an interview with Kristen Welker that will air Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
“What I can tell you is that there is a famine in the north and it is moving south,” he said.
Watch the full interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
Since mid-March, the United Nations has said hunger “it’s close” Gaza, however, has yet to officially announce that it believes famine has hit the province.
USAID Director Samantha Power in April became the first US official It was plausible to estimate that famine had occurred in some parts of Gaza. No other US official has made such an assessment.
McCain said that while an official famine has yet to be declared, based on what his organization has seen and experienced on the ground, he believes there is a “full-blown” problem in Gaza.
“It’s horrible. You know, it’s very hard to watch and it’s very hard to hear,” McCain said in an interview.
He later said he hoped for a ceasefire so people in Gaza could start getting fed “more quickly”. McCain added that people in Gaza “need water, they need sanitation, they need medicine – it’s all part of hunger – it’s a matter of hunger.”
Efforts to deliver food aid to Gaza have been met with both political resistance and threats of violence on the ground.
In early March, the US then began coordinating food drops to Gaza More than 100 Palestinians were killed He is trying to get aid in northern Gaza. Humanitarian aid groups assessed this aid as a “drop in the bucket”.
World Central Kitchen, a US-based nonprofit group that has distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza, resumed operations on Monday after 7 aid workers were killed as a result of an Israeli airstrike on April 1st.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday that “incremental progress” It was done in Gaza, but called on Israel to allow and facilitate humanitarian aid by land routes.
Guterres called on the international community to “do everything possible to prevent completely preventable human-caused hunger.”