PARIS: Only 1.5 per cent of Gaza’s farmland is accessible and undamaged — less than a square mile — according to the latest satellite survey published Wednesday by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which warned the Palestinian territory was on “the brink of a full-scale famine”.
In its previous survey, published at the end of May, the FAO had indicated that less than five per cent of Gaza farmland was both accessible and undamaged, based on data from the UN Satellite Centre.
The survey, which dates from July 28, found that 8.6 per cent of Gaza’s farmland was accessible, but only 1.5 per cent, or 2.3 square kilometres (less than one square mile) was both accessible and usable.
An additional 12.4 per cent of farmland is undamaged, but not accessible.
An overwhelming majority of Gaza’s farmland — 86.1 per cent — is damaged, the survey found.
“Gaza is now on the brink of a full-scale famine,” the FAO’s director-general Qu Dongyu said in a statement.
“People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods,” he added.
Qu called for safe and sustained humanitarian access to restore local food production and avoid a further loss of life.
“The right to food is a basic human right,” he said.
Before the conflict, agriculture accounted for around 10 percent of the Gaza Strip’s economy.
The FAO estimated that more than 560,000 people, or a quarter of the population, were being at least partially supported by agriculture and fishing.
The Israeli government is under growing pressure to bring the war in Gaza to an end, with concern mounting after the United Nations warned that famine was unfolding in the territory of more than two million Palestinians.
The October 2023 attack by Hamas that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s 2023 attack, 49 are still held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
The Israeli offensive has killed at least 61,158 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry, which are considered reliable by the United Nations. – AFP
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