United Nations, May 4 (RHC)-- The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) says there is a “full-blown famine” in the northern Gaza Strip following nearly seven months of Israel’s genocidal war against the besieged Palestinian territory.

WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain raised the alarm in an interview with NBC and became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the cut-off area had gone on the brink of famine.

“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC.  “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”

On the NBC News program "Meet the Press" -- set to air on Sunday -- Cindy McCain said that her remarks are based on what the WFP has seen and experienced on the ground.  UN officials and aid agencies have for months warned of such a scenario.

The WFP chief underlined that a ceasefire and a greatly increased flow of aid through land and sea routes was essential to confronting the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which is home to 2.3 million people.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said a panel that serves as an internationally recognized monitor for food crises had warned in March that northern Gaza was on the brink of famine and likely to experience it in May.

The USAID stressed that since March, northern Gaza had not received anything like the aid needed to stave off famine.  Acute malnutrition rates there among children under five have surged from 1% before the war to 30% five months later, the USAID added, calling it the fastest such climb in hunger in recent history, more than in grave conflicts and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) says children are starving to death in Gaza amid the Israeli regime’s devastating war on the besieged territory.

In an interview with CNN last month, McCain said children are starving to death in the besieged Palestinian territory as the Tel Aviv regime has been using food as a weapon of war and deliberately blocking aid deliveries to Gaza over the past months.  She warned that Gaza is “literally on the brink of going over the edge, over the cliff with famine and not being able to recover from it.”

Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance groups carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 34,596 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 77,816 others.

The Israeli offensive has left 85 percent of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60 percent of the territory’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.