WFP halves West Bank food aid as 900,000 people go short

The World Food Programme will cut its West Bank food list from 400,000 people to 200,000 this month. The agency announced the reduction on 1 September. Food needs in the territory have more than doubled since 2023. WFP now puts the number of food-insecure people in the West Bank at about 900,000.

Shaun Hughes, the country director for the Palestinian territories, told a Geneva briefing that movement restrictions, demolitions and displacement have stripped families of land, livestock and wages. "Right now, we should be scaling up our assistance in the West Bank, not cutting these vital lifelines," he said. Claire Nevill, the agency's spokesperson for the territories, told the Associated Press that the same squeeze already hit Gaza. In July WFP cut the cash value of aid by 40 percent for 375,000 people there, covering about 75,000 families.

What the numbers say about the household

WFP's latest quarterly survey found that 76 percent of West Bank households have lost a large share of their income. About 12 percent of Palestinians in the territory have poor food consumption. One third of families cannot buy a nutritious diet. The worst figures sit in rural areas and in the south, including villages around Hebron, which had been the core of the 400,000-person caseload.

Food and fuel prices in the West Bank remain among the highest in the Middle East. Families have sold assets and cut both the number and the quality of meals. Hughes said households that once lived off their own land now cannot reach that land or the jobs that replaced it.

The money that is missing

Over the next six months, from September 2026, WFP says it needs another $386 million to serve an estimated two million food-insecure people across Gaza and the West Bank. Donors have reduced humanitarian budgets since last year. The agency has already warned that further cuts in Gaza will follow if that sum does not arrive.

WFP still lists 1.5 million people in Gaza as receiving some form of support, including one million on monthly food aid. The July cash cut was the first large reduction on that side of the line. The West Bank cut is the second. Both are funding decisions, not a finding that need has fallen.

What COGAT did not say

Reuters asked COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry unit that coordinates civilian affairs in the West Bank, for comment. The unit referred the query to the Israeli military. The military did not respond in time for the original dispatch.

The operational result is simple. Two hundred thousand people who were on a WFP list in August will not be on it in September. Nine hundred thousand people in the same territory are classified as food insecure. The gap between those two figures is the part of the story that money, not a new needs assessment, now decides.