THE Gaza population “starving”he complained today senior WHO official, while major donor countries announced the suspension of their aid to the UN agency for Palestine refugees (Unrwa).

“It’s a starving population. It’s a population pushed to the brink,” the director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies management program, Michael Ryan, told a news conference in Geneva.

“Palestinians in Gaza are suffering massive destruction … If you’re asking if the destruction can get worse, yes, absolutely,” he added.

Humanitarian aid is trickling into the Palestinian territory, which is under full Israeli siege after the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7.

“The number of calories the people of Gaza are consuming has been systematically reduced and the quality of the diet has decreased. People are not supposed to survive on food aid for months and months or years,” Ryan explained.

“And if you combine the lack of food with the overpopulation as well as the cold and the lack of shelter, you have the perfect conditions for a massive epidemic in children,” he said.

“To date, more than 100,000 Gazans are either dead or injured or missing or reported dead,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference.

“The risk of starvation is high and intensifying every day,” he said as Unrwa’s civilian aid operations are under threat following Israeli accusations that 12 of the agency’s 30,000 regional employees were involved in the October 7 attack.

Several donor countries, including the US, suspended their funding to UNRWA. According to Tedros, this will have “catastrophic consequences for the population in Gaza”.

Last week, the World Health Organization was accused by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva of “collusion” with Hamas, saying the WHO had “chosen to ignore” evidence showing, according to Israel, that the Islamist movement had use the hospitals to carry out attacks, hide underground tunnels and weapons.

The WHO once again rejected these accusations.

“The accusation of collusion (…) is really irresponsible because it could put our employees at risk. But I would like to assure the ambassador that there is no collusion and that the WHO denies any accusation. We are impartial and we are doing our job “, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.