The World Food Program [WFP] is slashing food aid to Gaza, because the program is running out of money. The WFP said in a statement Monday that it would end monthly assistance to 500,000 people in Gaza, due to a funding shortfall. This will be done despite increasingly acute needs in the war-battered Palestinian territory. With the cutbacks, 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza—still about half the population—will be receiving either food or cash assistance each month from the UN agency, but only about half the previous levels.

“Families receiving food assistance will now receive only one food parcel (instead of two) and a smaller bag of wheat flour,” the WFP said. “The number of hot meals WFP provides has been reduced from 250,000 to 150,000 a day. Families living 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.”

The WFP said its efforts had mitigated the effects during a famine last year in Gaza—a description of the situation disputed by Israel—and warned that conditions had not improved to the point that it can take away aid. “People are not safe. Airstrikes continue on a daily basis. People continue to be displaced,” Shaun Hughes, the WFP country director, told AFP at the agency’s office in east Jerusalem. “Almost everybody remains without a permanent home to live in. And the humanitarian conditions are brutal,” he said. According to the latest assessments, 1.4 million people—or two-thirds of Gaza’s population—are still “acutely food insecure” and need humanitarian assistance to survive.

Since the ceasefire, the WFP has been able to step up assistance and has been reaching between 1.5 million and 1.8 million people every month. “This has been a lifeline. But now, rather than being able to sustain and scale up that assistance, we’re actually having to reduce it,” Hughes said. “And that’s not because we don’t have humanitarian access to deliver food; that’s because we don’t have funding.” The WFP says it needs $450 million to maintain critical operations in Gaza and the West Bank over the next six months, from October, 2026 to March, 2027. In 2026, the agency received only about half the funding it had received in prior years.