Fawza Awad is 75 and a widow. In January 2025 an Israeli military operation against the refugee camps of the northern West Bank pushed tens of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, and she was one of them, forced out of the Tulkarem camp. As Fayha Shalash reports for Al Jazeera, she now lives in part of an unfinished house in Tulkarem that belongs to her daughter, together with her son, his wife and their child. She says her old home was demolished and a road for military vehicles now runs where it stood. One of her sons has been held by Israel since 2024. Her other sons used to work in Israel and are now unemployed. She has asthma and high blood pressure, and her medication costs at least 200 shekels ($64) a month. She has received no food aid from the World Food Programme for five months.
The reason is mostly arithmetic. On September 1, the WFP announced that it would halve the number of people it supports in the occupied West Bank, from 400,000 to 200,000, citing “critical funding constraints” as international donors gave less. Shaun Hughes, the agency’s country director for Palestine, put it bluntly: “We’re running out of funding, and that means that from today, some 200,000 people will lose access to critical assistance.” The WFP told Al Jazeera that some families had lost their aid before the announcement, which would explain how Awad got to five months without help.
The way the agency describes who got cut is worth reading carefully. According to the WFP, losing aid “does not imply that a beneficiary is ineligible.” The cut was a single decision applied across everyone already receiving help. Some people may be put back on the list, and they will find out by text message. Translated: nobody checked whether you still needed food, because need was never the constraint. The constraint was the budget. When a programme decides who gets help by need, it tells you whether you qualify. When the money runs out, all it can tell you is whether you happened to be among the 200,000 it can still pay for, and that some of the rest may get a text later.
How big is the gap? The WFP estimates that about 900,000 people in the West Bank face food insecurity. Before September it reached 400,000, roughly 44 percent of them. Now it reaches 200,000, about 22 percent. That 200,000 still get cash transfers, vouchers, food, livelihood programmes and nutrition services, and the agency says it lacks the resources to reach every family that needs help. Meanwhile need has more than doubled since 2023. UN News, reporting the cut, said the food-insecure population now makes up more than a quarter of the West Bank, compared with 11 percent two years earlier.
Where the income went
Need doubling is not some mysterious weather event. Several things happened to West Bank incomes at once. Since October 2023, when Israel stopped issuing work permits, tens of thousands of Palestinians who worked in Israel and in the settlements have had no jobs. Since May 2025, according to the economist Ubai Aboudi, Israel has kept the customs revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, so the PA cannot pay public salaries. Then Israeli restrictions on aid groups, including the suspension of the registrations of 37 international organisations, reduced the private help that might have filled some of the gap. “Around half a million Palestinian families need food assistance,” Aboudi said. The WFP’s latest quarterly analysis found that 76 percent of households had lost a significant share of their income, 12 percent of the population has poor food consumption, and a third of households cannot afford a healthy diet. Rural areas and the southern governorates were worst affected. The agency itself ties the worsening hunger to Israeli attacks and forced displacement.
So wages, salaries, NGO support and UN food aid all shrank over the same few years. That leaves families like Rabab Qasim’s. She is 47, and she, her 72-year-old husband Talib Abu Sarriya and their three children share a room of 30 square metres at al-Muwahhad School in Thannabeh, Tulkarem. More than 1,000 people displaced from the Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps are sheltering at the school. The family has had no aid for three months and has no income. Talib used to run a vegetable stall in the camp, and he says they often go to bed hungry. Treatment for Rabab’s herniated disc costs 300 shekels ($96) a month. “All I wish for is to be able to buy a bed,” she said. Whether these families will ever be allowed back to the camps is before Israel’s Supreme Court.
In the south it looks different, with settlers instead of camps. Said al-Amour, 61, lives in Khirbet al-Rakeez in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron. His family of 14 has received no WFP aid for seven months. In April 2025 a settler shot him and his leg was amputated. His treatment costs at least 1,200 shekels ($385) a month, which is more than his 14-person household’s only income, a few olive trees, can reliably produce, in a region where the olive harvest itself has become dangerous. “They are trying to steal our land,” he said.
Same budget, other territory
The West Bank is not the only place the WFP is running out of money. In Gaza, the agency’s acting executive director Carl Skau said this month that the number of people it reaches fell in October from 1.6 million to 1.1 million. Families still on the list get one food parcel instead of two, and a smaller bag of flour. Skau said the cuts had nothing to do with falling need or access. They came down to funding alone. That cut arrived in the same week the crossings closed. Aid groups everywhere have been short since the United States led a sharp drop in support and other Western donors also gave less.
Normally, when an aid agency cuts a programme, the explanation involves eligibility rules: means tests, revised criteria, that sort of thing. The WFP has skipped all of that and said the plain version, that these people still qualify and there is no money for them. For Fawza Awad, the honesty has not come with any food.