UN food agency to cut aid to 500,000 people in Gaza as funding dries up

The World Food Programme will stop monthly assistance to half a million people in Gaza because of a funding shortfall, the UN agency said on Monday. The cuts leave 1.1 million Palestinians, around half of Gaza’s population, receiving food or cash each month. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, the WFP had been reaching between 1.5 million and 1.8 million people a 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,” Shaun Hughes, the WFP’s country director, told AFP in east Jerusalem. "And that’s not because we don’t have humanitarian access to deliver food; that’s because we don’t have funding.