Food Insecurity Bulletin - First Half of 2025 – Issue No.32
The Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) has been issuing the Food Security Bulletin since 2009, twice yearly, using its own resources to investigate the food security sector in Palestine. The Bulletin aims to support decision-makers and institutions working in the field of food security in Palestine, constituting a useful and periodic reference on the latest developments in the sector. The Bulletin is a useful reference for monitoring trends in the sector and comparing conditions across time. The Bulletin is only one of several MAS research priorities, although as a topic, food security has received significant attention in recent years, especially through collaborative research projects with our partners, particularly the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Considering the ever so increasingly catastrophic conditions with each passing day experienced in the Gaza Strip, the Bulletin since 2024 has been retitled as the “Food (In)Security Bulletin,” in recognition of the extreme food insecurity in Palestine under Israeli occupation policies of weaponizing starvation in its aggression on the Gaza Strip. This Bulletin is the third published since the onset of aggression, which has left devastating food and nutrition crises that by the time this issue was written (July 2025) had reached unprecedented levels, causing the agonizing deaths of over 200 Palestinians from starvation. Within this context, the Bulletin complements efforts by MAS to document and monitor the Israeli aggression on Palestine since 2023 in its multiple social and economic dimensions, and to assess the relief, policy, funding, and institutional requirements to respond to the aggression.
In its first section, this issue sheds light on developments in the first half of 2025 in food insecurity in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the Gaza Strip, it reviews how Israel’s total siege policy is crucial when understanding the nutrition devastation in the Gaza Strip. This policy continues to manifest in a clear aim for weaponizing starvation for military aims, including displacing the population. The first section also reveals the power dynamics responsible for starving the population by detailing the impact of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s operations on food provisions and the state of insecurity in the Strip. Moving towards the West Bank, the first section also unpacks the reoccurring yearly ordeal regarding meat prices and consumption amidst a quota that has remained nearly unchanged since 1994. Moreover, developments regarding global and local food prices are reviewed in the second section of the bulletin. The impact of the nearly 100- day siege on the Gaza Strip is apparent when analyzing the trends in food prices, most apparent in the Gaza Strip in the second quarter of the year. The data analyzed in this section continue to paint a devastating image that started in October 2023 and continues until today.
The final section continues the Bulletin’s tradition of reviewing and highlighting selected recent publications on food security locally and globally. It begins by reviewing the 2025 Global Report on Food Crises, a report that reviews the latest developments in food crises, their driving factors, indicators, and future outlooks, in selected countries/regions, including Palestine.
It also provides projections regarding food crises across these areas. The Bulletin then reviews several recent peer-reviewed papers on the link between ‘conflict’ and food security in Palestine, in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank. These papers provide evidence to the role of Israeli policies on the deteriorating nutrition and food conditions currently, and prior to the aggression, through exploring and utilizing various socioeconomic and political variables and indicators. In line with the Bulletin’s role of informing researchers and policy makers, the section concludes by reviewing a recent paper that aims to test whether the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale (FIES) is an appropriate tool for measuring food insecurity in volatile contexts similar to the Gaza Strip.