Famine has struck an area of Gaza and will likely spread over the next month, a global hunger monitor determined on Friday, an assessment that will escalate pressure on Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system said 514,000 people, nearly a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, are experiencing famine, and that number was expected to rise to 641,000 by the end of September.
Some 280,000 of those people are in a northern region covering Gaza City - known as Gaza governorate - which the IPC said was in famine, its first such determination in the enclave. The rest are in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, central and southern areas that the IPC projected would be in famine by the end of next month.
Israel dismissed the report as "false and biased", with the military body that coordinates aid deliveries into Gaza saying the IPC had based its survey on "partial data originating from the Hamas Terrorist Organisation".
The Israeli foreign ministry on Friday categorically rejected the findings, saying there was no famine in Gaza and that the findings were based on "Hamas lies".
"There is no famine in Gaza," said the ministry in a statement and slammed the document saying it was "based on Hamas lies laundered through organisations with vested interests".
For a region to be classified as in famine at least 20 percent of people must be suffering extreme food shortages, with one in three children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease.
Even if a region has not yet been classified as in famine because those thresholds have not been met, the IPC can determine that households there are suffering famine conditions, which it describes as starvation, destitution and death.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday that famine in Gaza was the direct result of Israeli government actions, and warned that deaths from starvation could amount to a war crime.
The IPC analysis comes after Britain, Canada, Australia and many European states said the humanitarian crisis had reached "unimaginable levels" after nearly two years of the war on Gaza.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has long warned of an "epic humanitarian catastrophe" in the enclave of more than 2 million people.
US President Donald Trump last month said many people there were starving, putting him at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly said there was no starvation.