How Middle East conflicts are exacerbating global hunger and jeopardizing a generation

DUBAI: Conflicts in the Middle East have intensified the global hunger crisis, leaving more children vulnerable to malnutrition and developmental issues, potentially jeopardizing the future of an entire generation.

Globally, almost 160 million people are in need of urgent assistance to stave off hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, a global partnership that measures food insecurity.

While economic turmoil and climate extremes are among the top drivers of rising hunger worldwide, it is the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan that are the primary causes in the Middle East and North Africa region, according to the Global Report on Food Crises.

These conflicts, which have triggered mass displacements, disrupted supply chains and led to a significant drop in agricultural production, have deepened existing food insecurity for millions of people in an already climate stressed region.

The spillover of Gaza hostilities has exacerbated the climate crisis in the region and put more people in Yemen, Lebanon and Syria at the risk of food insecurity.

In 2024, more than 41 million people were acutely food insecure across the MENA region, according to the latest figures of the World Food Programme.

There are no official figures on hunger-related deaths in Sudan. (AFP)

Almost half of these were in Sudan, where 24.6 million people are facing acute malnutrition, including 638,000 living in famine conditions and 8.1 million teetering on the brink of mass starvation.

The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which broke out on April 15, 2023, has displaced at least 10 million people, making it the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.

The IPC’s declaration of a famine in Sudan marks only the third formal famine determination since the international famine monitoring system was established two decades ago. Previous classifications were made in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017, and South Sudan again in 2020.

Children are bearing the brunt of Sudan’s hunger crisis.

Timmo Gaasbeek, a food security expert who has worked in Sudan, said that it is often infants and young children who are among the first to succumb to malnutrition and starvation during times of famine.

“Young children, and the elderly, are more vulnerable than adults, and will be at higher risk of death due to different diseases like diarrhea or malaria,” Gaasbeek told Arab News.

“In famines, most people die of diseases that their bodies have no resistance to because of hunger, rather than of lack of food itself.”

As of November 2024, an estimated 4.7 million children under the age of five, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women, were suffering from acute malnutrition in Sudan, according to WFP.

Palestinian health authorities and the World Peace Foundation expect the number of children who have succumbed to hunger in Gaza to be far higher than official estimates. (AFP)

Even in areas where famine has not been declared, persistent hunger and malnutrition can also ultimately result in death. “Even a 35 percent deficit in energy intake can be fatal if sustained long enough,” Gaasbeek said.

“Millions of people in Sudan are currently at this level of hunger, or worse.”

Widespread hunger in Sudan has been compounded by a sharp economic decline, high food prices, and weather extremes combined with poor sanitation, which has triggered a deadly cholera outbreak, creating what has been dubbed “the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.”

As of December, the IPC had declared famine in five areas, including Zamzam, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam in North Darfur. People in five other areas of North Darfur, including the besieged Al-Fasher, could face starvation by May. A further 17 areas are at risk of famine-level malnutrition.

As a result of the fighting, restrictions on aid and other logistical challenges, it took three months for a WFP aid convoy to reach Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, home to 500,000 people and the first area where famine was declared in August.

“The combination of fighting around North Darfur’s capital Al-Fasher, and impassable roads brought on by the rainy season from June to September, severed incoming transport of food assistance for months,” WFP said in a statement at the time.

Access was only made possible after Sudanese authorities agreed to temporarily open the Adre border crossing from Chad into Darfur until February 2025.

This aid was a drop in the ocean, however, as the destruction of Sudanese farming has set the country back years.

An internally displaced women sits next to a World Food Programme truck during a food distribution in Bentiu. (AFP)

Gaasbeek said that it would take about 800,000 tons of food aid in 2026 and 400,000 tons in 2027 to minimize hunger-related deaths in Sudan, which can only happen if the war ends before the start of the next planting season in June 2025.

“The key to stopping hunger in Sudan is getting more food into the country,” he said.

About two thirds of grain consumed in Sudan is produced locally, and commercial imports provide about a third. However, those two aspects are affected by the war and economic collapse.

“Commercial imports are maxed out at the moment as consumers have limited purchasing power and numerous logistical and financial challenges hindering food distribution,” Gaasbeek said.

“Companies have limited resources to import more. This means that the only thing that can make a difference this year is an increase in food aid imports.”

He estimates that if aid deliveries remain limited, some 6 million people could die from hunger in 2025. “If the conflict continues unabated, or worse escalates further, both food production and imports would stagnate, requiring very high levels of food aid to prevent mass starvation.”

While there are no official figures on hunger-related deaths in Sudan, Gaasbeek estimates that hunger and disease killed about 500,000 people in 2024 — about one percent of the population.

INNUMBERS

• 18.2m Children born into hunger in 2024 — or 35 every minute — according to Save the Children.

• 5 percent Rise in the number of children born into hunger in 2024 compared to a year earlier, according to UN FAO.

“It is not unrealistic, especially that the deaths of children are not very visible,” he said.

On Jan. 6, the UN launched a $4.2 billion call for funding to assist 20.9 million of the 30.4 million people across Sudan who are now in desperate need. More than half of them are children.

In late December, the Sudanese government rejected the IPC’s conclusions that famine was now rife in Sudan, accusing the organization of procedural and transparency failings and of failing to use updated field data.

The IPC had requested access to other areas at risk of famine in South Darfur, Al-Jazirah and Khartoum to gain data on the situation, but the government has been accused of stonewalling such efforts.

Sudan is not the only hunger hotspot in the MENA region.

The war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which began on Oct. 7, 2023, has displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s two million people and has led to high levels of acute food insecurity, with half the population expected to face extreme malnutrition.

On Nov. 9, the Famine Review Committee issued an alert warning of “imminent famine” in the besieged northern Gaza, where the World Health Organization estimates some 75,000 inhabitants remain.

With some 70 percent of Gaza’s crop fields destroyed, and with shops, factories and bakeries damaged or destroyed, domestic food manufacture has all but collapsed, according to the IPC. (AFP)

Many of the displaced are battling frigid winter temperatures in squalid tents, frequently flooded by heavy rain in south and central Gaza, without consistent access to food or medical services.

Early in the conflict, Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, severely limiting the amount of humanitarian aid that was permitted to enter. Tighter restrictions have been imposed on northern Gaza since last October, as Israel intensifies efforts to weed out Hamas fighters.

In December, Israeli authorities allowed only two aid convoys to enter northern Gaza, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, exacerbating the hunger crisis.

With some 70 percent of Gaza’s crop fields destroyed, and with shops, factories and bakeries damaged or destroyed, domestic food manufacture has all but collapsed, according to the IPC.

As in Sudan, the burden of food scarcity has fallen on vulnerable children. In June, the WHO recorded 32 deaths from malnutrition, including 28 children under the age of five.

“Over 8,000 children under five years old have been diagnosed and treated for acute malnutrition, including 1,600 children with severe acute malnutrition,” WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said at the time.

However, Palestinian health authorities and the World Peace Foundation expect the number of children who have succumbed to hunger in Gaza to be far higher than official estimates.

A woman bakes bread in a traditional clay oven at a makeshift displacement camp in Khan Yunis. (AFP)

More than 96 percent of women and children in Gaza cannot meet their basic nutritional needs, as they survive on rationed flour, lentils, pasta and canned goods — a diet that slowly compromises their health, according to the UN children’s fund, UNICEF.

For children, the impact of malnutrition on development can be irreversible.

“It affects their mental capacities and can put them at risk of physical challenges including stunted growth, delayed puberty, weakened immunity and increased risk of chronic diseases, vision and hearing impairments,” Dr. Yazeed Mansour Alkhawaldeh, a former health specialist at Medecins Sans Frontieres, told Arab News.

“Such circumstances can impact children’s cognitive and emotional development as well, resulting in a lower IQ and poor academic performance. They are also more prone to develop anxiety, depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

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TAWILA: Sudanese mother Amira wakes up every day trembling, haunted by scenes of mass rapes she saw while fleeing the western city of El-Fasher after it was overrun by paramilitaries.
Following an 18-month siege marked by starvation and bombardment, El-Fasher — the last army stronghold in the western Darfur region — fell on October 26 to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been at war with the military since April 2023.
Reports have since emerged of mass killings, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions in a city where communications have largely been cut off.
“The rapes were gang rapes. Mass rape in public, rape in front of everyone and no one could stop it,” Amira said from a makeshift shelter in Tawila, some 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of El-Fasher.
The mother of four spoke during a webinar organized by campaign group Avaaz with several survivors of the recent violence.
Avaaz gave the survivors who participated in the webinar pseudonyms for their safety.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said more than 300 survivors of sexual violence had sought care from its teams in Tawila after a previous RSF assault on the nearby Zamzam camp, which displaced more than 380,000 people last spring.
“The RSF have carried out widespread sexual violence across towns and villages in Sudan to humiliate, assert control and to forcefully displace families and communities from their homes,” Amnesty International warned in April.
The rights group has documented conflict-related sexual violence by both the army and RSF — particularly in the capital Khartoum and Darfur — and denounced “over two decades of impunity for such crimes, particularly by the RSF.”

- Nighttime assaults -

In Korma, a village about 40 kilometers northwest of El-Fasher, Amira said she was detained for two days because she could not pay RSF fighters for safe passage.
Those unable to pay, she said, were denied food, water and the ability to leave, and mass assaults took place at night.
“You’d be asleep and they’d come and rape you,” she said.
“I saw with my own eyes people who couldn’t afford to pay and the fighters took their daughters instead.
“They said, ‘Since you can’t pay, we’ll take the girls.’ If you had daughters of a young age, they would take them immediately.”
Sudan’s state minister for social welfare, Sulimah Ishaq, told AFP that 300 women were killed on the day El-Fasher fell, “some after being sexually assaulted.”
The General Coordination for Displaced People and Refugees in Darfur, an independent humanitarian group, had documented 150 cases of sexual violence since the fall of El-Fasher until November 1.
“Some incidents occurred in El-Fasher and others during the journey to Tawila,” Adam Rojal, the organization’s spokesman, told AFP.

- Raped at gunpoint -

Last week, the UN confirmed alarming reports that at least 25 women were gang-raped when RSF forces entered a shelter for displaced people near El-Fasher University in the city’s west.
“Witnesses confirmed that RSF personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint,” Seif Magango, spokesperson for the UN human rights office, said in Geneva.
Mohamed, another survivor who joined the Avaaz webinar from Tawila, described how women and girls of all ages were searched and humiliated in Garni, a town between El-Fasher and Tawila.
“If they found nothing on you, they beat you. They searched the girls, even tearing apart their (sanitary) pads,” he said.
In Garni, before reaching Korma, Amira said that RSF leaders would “greet people,” but as soon as they left, the fighters who stayed behind began torturing them.
“They start categorising you: ‘You were married to a soldier.’ ‘You were affiliated with the army,’” she said.
She also described seeing men slaughtered with knives by RSF fighters. “My 12-year-old son saw it himself, and he is now in a bad psychological state,” she said.
“We wake up shivering from fear, images of slaughter haunt us.”
More than 65,000 people have fled El-Fasher since its fall, including more than 5,000 who are now sheltering in Tawila, which was already hosting more than 650,000 displaced people, according to the UN.
In Tawila, hundreds of people have huddled together in makeshift tents in a vast desert expanse, scrounging together what they can to prepare food for their families, AFP video shows.
Rojal of the General Coordination for Displaced People and Refugees in Darfur warned that the situation “needs immediate intervention.”
“People need food, water, medicine, shelter and psychological support,” he said.

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