内容摘要：Presidential candidate Nicusor Dan speaks to media after polls closed for the second round of the country’s presidential election redo in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Presidential candidate Nicusor Dan speaks to media after polls closed for the second round of the country’s presidential election redo in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

, living in “catastrophic” levels of hunger, and 1 million others can barely get enough food, according to findings by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises.The group said “there is a high risk” of outright famine if circumstances don’t change.

Israel has banned all food, shelter, medicine and any other goods from entering the Palestinian territory for the past 10 weeks, even as it carries out waves of airstrikes and ground operations. Gaza’s population of around 2.3 million people relies almost entirely on outside aid to survive, because Israel’s 19-month-old military campaign has wiped away most capacity to produce food inside the territory.Israel’s Foreign Ministry rejected the findings, saying the IPC’s previous forecasts had proven unfounded and that the group undercounted the amount of aid that entered Gaza during a ceasefire earlier this year.Food supplies are emptying out dramatically. Communal kitchens handing out cooked meals are virtually the only remaining source of food for most people in Gaza now, but they too are rapidly shutting down for lack of stocks.

Thousands of Palestinians crowd daily outside the public kitchens,“We end up waiting in line for four, five hours, in the sun. It is exhausting,” said Riham Sheikh el-Eid, waiting at a kitchen in the southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday. “At the end, we walk away with nothing. It is not enough for everybody.”

The lack of a famine declaration doesn’t mean people aren’t already starving, and a declaration shouldn’t be a precondition for ending the suffering, said Chris Newton, an analyst for the International Crisis Group focusing on starvation as a weapon of war.

“The Israeli government is starving Gaza as part of its attempt to destroy Hamas and transform the strip,” he said.A municipal worker shows owlets rescued from a fallen tree after a powerful storm in Montenegro’s capital Podgorica, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Risto Bozovic)

A municipal worker in Montenegro holds owlets rescued from a fallen tree after a powerful storm in Podgorica. A herd of deer cross a road in a bucolic scene near Frankfurt, Germany.Deer cross a road in the Taunus forest in Wehrheim near Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Deer cross a road in the Taunus forest in Wehrheim near Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)In a world where war and disaster dominates headlines, the natural world survives and even thrives. AP photographers document it, often spotting beauty even while covering death and destruction.