International outrage at Israel's brutal siege of Gaza is growing amid increasing signs of starvation in the shattered Palestinian territory.
Thirty-three Palestinians have starved to death over the past 48 hours, taking the total number of people to have died of hunger since October 2023 to 101, according to the local health ministry. Eighty of those killed were children.
International organisations are now warning that their staff members are beginning to starve.
In a joint statement on Monday, 28 Western countries - including France, the UK, Canada, Italy and Australia - condemned the Israeli siege and called for an immediate end to the war.
"The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children," the countries said.
The Israeli government dismissed the statement as "disconnected from reality".
The US was not among the countries to sign the statement but reiterated its desire to end the conflict.
"[Trump] wants the killing to end," White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday, describing the situation in Gaza as "quite brutal".
Medical workers, journalists at risk
The IPC, a UN-backed food security monitor, warned in May that about 500,000 people were facing "catastrophic" levels of food insecurity as result of the Israeli blockade.
As many as 1.5 million people - around two-thirds of the pre-war population - are at risk of acute malnutrition or starvation, it said.
Almost a third of the population is not eating for days at a time, according to the World Food Programme. Tens of thousands of women and children are now in urgent need of treatment, it said on Sunday.
The lack of food in the besieged territory has sent rates of acute malnutrition spiralling, particularly among children.
The rate of acute malnutrition among children under five more than doubled between March and June due to the 11-week total blockade, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA. Around one in 10 children screened by UNRWA medical teams is malnourished.
UNRWA said on Monday it was receiving "desperate messages of starvation" from its staff in Gaza.
The journalists' union of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency warned on the same day that AFP journalists in Gaza also risk starving to death.
Israeli blockade
Israel has maintained a siege on Gaza for more than 21 months, only allowing a fraction of the food needed by the population to cross the border, while blocking the entry of fuel and medical supplies.
In March, it imposed a total siege on the territory for 11 weeks before beginning to allow the entry of tiny amounts of aid.
UNRWA warehouses on the Israeli side of the border contain enough food for the entire population for more than three months, the agency says, but Israel refuses to let the supplies into Gaza.
The small amounts of food that have been allowed into the strip have been distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israel-backed organisation that has seized control of aid distribution from the UN and other relief agencies.
Humanitarian groups have refused to work with the GHF, whose sites have been the scenes of almost daily massacres of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces.
Since the GHF began operating two months ago, the Israeli military has killed almost one thousand people trying to receive food and wounded more than six thousand others.
In one of the largest such massacres, Israeli tanks and drones on Sunday gunned down dozens of people near a World Food Programme aid convoy, according to the UN agency.
The UN and humanitarian agencies have accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war.
In November, the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians.