WFP halves West Bank food aid as 900,000 stay hungry and donors pull back

The World Food Programme will cut West Bank food assistance in half from September. The caseload drops from 400,000 people to 200,000. The agency announced the cut in Jerusalem on 1 September and repeated it at a Geneva briefing the same day.

About 900,000 people in the West Bank are now classed as food insecure, more than double the 2023 figure. WFP’s latest quarterly survey found that 76 percent of households have seen a sharp drop in income. Food and fuel prices in the territory remain among the highest in the Middle East.

Shaun Hughes, the country director for Palestine, said movement restrictions, demolitions and displacement have eaten into livelihoods. “Families who were once thriving and earning a living from their land are now unable to afford enough food,” he said. The remaining aid will be cash vouchers, food parcels, livelihood programmes and nutrition services, aimed at the households the agency ranks as most exposed.

Gaza is already thinner

In Gaza the agency still lists 1.5 million people on its books. In July it cut the cash value of assistance by 40 percent for 375,000 of them, about 75,000 families. Claire Nevill, the spokesperson for the Palestinian territories, told the Associated Press that further Gaza cuts are unavoidable without new money.

Over the next six months WFP says it needs an extra $386 million to reach about two million food-insecure people across Gaza and the West Bank. That is a funding ask, not a pledge. Foreign donors have been shrinking humanitarian budgets since last year. The West Bank cut is the visible result of that arithmetic, not a finding that need has fallen.

What the cut does on the ground

Most of the 400,000 people on the old list lived in rural belts and in the south, including villages around Hebron. Those are the same belts where settlers and military raids have made it harder to reach fields and livestock. When a household loses land access and then loses a WFP ration, the two shocks stack.

Hughes put the sequence in one sentence at Geneva: needs are rising while the budget is falling, so the agency is ranking people and dropping half of them. There is no appeal window described in the 1 September note. A family that falls off the list this month is off unless a donor line is restored.

The political context the agency named

WFP’s statement tied the rise in hunger since 2023 to settler violence, army operations and the loss of agricultural land. That is the agency speaking in its own voice. It is also asking the same governments that fund it to treat the West Bank as a hunger file rather than a residual of the Gaza war.

The numbers that matter for a reader tracking the file are tight. 400,000 down to 200,000. 900,000 food insecure. 76 percent of surveyed homes with less income. $386 million unfunded for six months. A 40 percent cash cut already applied in Gaza. Those figures will move again if a large donor writes a cheque, and they will move the other way if they do not.

For the 200,000 people who stay on the list, the question is the size of the ration, not the existence of one. For the 200,000 who leave it, the question is whether a cousin, a municipal kitchen or a second agency picks up the gap. WFP has not said that anyone else is ready to do that.