UN-backed body confirms famine in Gaza City
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
A report by the internationally recognised body for determining global food insecurity has confirmed that there is now famine in Gaza City. The IPC warns that the dire situation is likely to expand to other parts of the territory by the end of next month - with half-a-million people in Gaza facing catastrophic conditions. Israel denies there is famine in the territory.
Also in the programme: Spain’s most famous architect on the path to sainthood; and the dinosaur with the 'eye-catching sail'.
(File photo: Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, August 21, 2025. Credit: Reuters/Hatem Khaled)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:10.7 | And we begin with the news that the UN-backed, internationally recognised group which looks at food insecurity, has confirmed there is now famine in Gaza City. |
| 0:21.3 | More than half a million people live in what are officially termed catastrophic conditions |
| 0:26.2 | and that the situation already dire across the rest of the embattled enclave |
| 0:30.8 | is only likely to deteriorate. |
| 0:33.8 | Over the next 10 months, the projection is that 132,000 children under the age of five are at risk of death from acute malnutrition. |
| 0:44.0 | The Israeli government has issued several very strongly worded rebuttals today. |
| 0:48.8 | Every forecast this body the IPC is made regarding Gaza during the war as proven baseless and completely false, |
| 0:55.7 | said the Foreign Ministry in a statement. This assessment too will be thrown in the despicable |
| 1:00.3 | trash bin of political documents. It's our main story this hour, and we'll begin with the UN's |
| 1:06.2 | top humanitarian official Tom Fletcher. This is what he had to say in Geneva as the IPC report was released four hours ago. |
| 1:14.2 | Please read the IPC report. |
| 1:17.6 | Cover to cover. |
| 1:19.6 | Read it in sorrow and in anger. |
| 1:25.0 | Not as words and numbers, |
| 1:30.5 | but as names and lives. |
| 1:35.4 | Be in no doubt that this is irrefutable testimony. |
| 1:41.8 | It is a famine, the Gaza famine. |
| 1:49.6 | It is a famine that we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel. |
| 1:56.8 | It is a famine within a few hundred meters of food in a fertile land. |
| 2:04.4 | It is a famine that hits the most vulnerable first, each with a name, each with a story, |
| 2:11.1 | that strips people of dignity before it strips them of life, that forces a parent to choose which child to feed, |
... |
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