UN food agency halves West Bank aid as funding shortfall deepens

The United Nations World Food Programme said this week it is halving the number of people it assists in the occupied West Bank, from 400,000 to 200,000, because donors have not provided enough money to sustain the operation. The agency said in a statement that the reduction takes effect this month and warned that further cuts, including to its parallel operation in Gaza, are possible without new funding.

The move comes as food insecurity in the West Bank has climbed sharply since the war in Gaza began, driven by a mix of movement restrictions, home demolitions, settler violence and a collapse in day labor across the territory. WFP's Palestine country director, Shaun Hughes, said the agency simply does not have the money to keep serving everyone it has been reaching.

The numbers

WFP says roughly 900,000 people in the West Bank are now food insecure, more than double the figure recorded two years ago, even as the pool of people it can afford to help shrinks by half. The agency says it urgently needs an additional $386 million over the next six months to sustain food assistance for an estimated two million people across Gaza and the West Bank combined. The United Nations' news service reported that nearly a quarter of the West Bank's population is now food insecure, up from roughly 11 percent two years ago, and that the 200,000 people being dropped from the rolls will lose access to cash vouchers, food parcels, livelihood support or nutrition services depending on which program they were enrolled in.

A separate humanitarian situation report published by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs puts West Bank unemployment at roughly 30 percent in the first quarter of the year, more than double the rate before the war, and finds that food consumption has deteriorated steadily since mid-2022. The office's tracking shows the share of households with poor or borderline food consumption has nearly tripled over roughly three years.

How the crisis built

The West Bank has not seen fighting on the scale of Gaza, but its economy has been squeezed by measures that intensified after October 2023: tighter Israeli military checkpoints and closures, a sharp drop in the number of Palestinian laborers permitted to work inside Israel, and a rise in settler attacks on farmland that WFP says have included crop destruction, livestock theft and arson. Those pressures have fallen hardest on rural communities and the southern governorates, where agriculture and day labor were once the backbone of household income.

WFP's own account of the shift is stark. Families who once earned a living from the land, the agency says, can no longer generate enough income to buy adequate food, pushing a population that had little history of needing food aid onto assistance rolls in growing numbers just as the money to pay for that assistance has dried up.

"Families who were once thriving and earning a living from their land are now unable to afford enough food," said Shaun Hughes, WFP's country director for Palestine.

The people being cut from WFP's rolls span the West Bank's twelve governorates but are concentrated in rural areas and the south, according to the agency, where household incomes have fallen furthest. Roughly three-quarters of West Bank households have seen a significant drop in income since the war began, WFP says, and a large share cannot cover a basic diet even with the assistance currently available. The Palestinian Ministry of Health has separately reported that more than a third of essential medicines are out of stock in the West Bank and that thousands of surgeries have been postponed this year, a sign that the funding squeeze on humanitarian operations extends well beyond food.

The West Bank cuts land alongside, rather than instead of, continued strain in Gaza, where WFP says it still supports about 1.5 million people but was forced in July to cut the value of cash assistance by 40 percent for 375,000 recipients. The agency has said further reductions there are likely without new funding, meaning the same shortfall driving the West Bank cuts is now shaping decisions in both territories at once. Aid workers say the two operations increasingly compete for the same shrinking pool of donor money, so a shortfall traced to one territory can translate quickly into cuts in the other, even though the populations and the assistance programs involved are formally separate.

Aid officials describe the cuts as a consequence of donor fatigue after nearly three years of overlapping crises competing for the same pool of humanitarian funding, from Gaza and Sudan to Ukraine. WFP's US support office said the agency is trying to prioritize the households in the deepest need with the resources it has, while acknowledging that halving the caseload will leave many families who still qualify as food insecure with no assistance at all. Regional outlets covering the announcement, including reporting from The National, noted that the cut comes despite WFP's own data showing need in the territory has roughly doubled over the same period, underscoring the gap between rising demand and shrinking donor support.

The UN's humanitarian coordination office for the Palestinian territories has flagged the West Bank's economic decline repeatedly over the past year, and officials there say the reduction in food aid is likely to compound problems already visible in health and education spending as households divert scarce cash toward food. No Israeli government body or Palestinian Authority ministry had issued a formal response to the WFP announcement at the time of writing.

What happens next

WFP says the $386 million appeal covers a six-month window beginning this month and will determine whether the agency can restore assistance to any of the households being dropped from the West Bank program, or whether it will instead be forced to cut further in Gaza. The agency has not set a date by which it expects the funding gap to close, and officials involved in the appeal say the outcome will depend heavily on decisions by a small number of major government donors in the coming weeks. Absent new commitments, WFP's own projections suggest food insecurity in the West Bank will continue to rise even as the number of people receiving help falls.