Emergency food assistance to vulnerable non-refugee Palestinians The 52 year-long crisis in Palestine has caused a deteriorating humanitarian situation, with communities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip suffering from a host of hardships. The unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip is impacting the livelihoods and access to essential services by its two million residents. Alongside the longstanding blockade and the unsolved internal Palestinian divide, the crisis has been exacerbated since March 2018 by the massive increase in Palestinian casualties in the context of demonstrations taking place near Israel’s perimeter fence, as well as limited escalations in hostilities. Gaza's economic and human capital are day-by-day being eroded. The World Bank and ILO estimate that Gaza's economy has over the past few years been kept afloat by large transfers of donor aid and spending through the budget of the Palestinian Authority (PA), both of which amounted to 70-80 percent of Gaza's GDP. However, these two sources have significantly declined during the last two years pushing Gaza into a recession in most economic sectors which has also led to a rapid deterioration of humanitarian conditions in Gaza . With deteriorating public services such as health care, water and sanitation, a shrinking job market and a liquidity crisis, Gazan residents are trapped in a circle of rising poverty and long-term unemployment. This multi-faceted crisis has been inflicting a heavy toll on the poorest, worsened their socio-economic conditions, food security status and livelihoods and negatively impacted on their ability to cope with increased hardships and engage in income-generating activities. In Gaza today, more than half of the population are unemployed and an all-time record high of 68.5 percent are food-insecure, including 50 percent in a severe state (source: 2018 SEFSEC). The situation is worst for non-refugees whose food insecurity is more prevalent (70.3%) than that prevailing among refugees (67.3%). Meeting the needs of both refugee and non-refugee communities indiscriminately is crucial to preserve harmony and stability within the population and address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in a holistic way. 

In this context, WFP has been scaling-up its food assistance interventions as of July 2019 and now aims at providing food assistance to 250,000 people who are among the poorest and most food-insecure non-refugees. The bulk of its assistance is channelled through electronic food vouchers (220,000 people) as the modality has proved to be an efficient catalyst to increase people's food security status, freedom of choice, purchasing power and stimulate an ailing economy. WFP works with two implementing partners to deliver its electronic food response, the American NGO Global Communities (98,000) and the Ministry of Social Development (120,000 people). Through the latter, WFP provides complementary food assistance (USD 10 pp pm) to those that have been enlisted in the national social protection programme and receive a wide range of social benefits and services, including cash-transfers, medical allowances, education and electricity subsidies, child protection and disability support. WFP's food support is all the more critical as the PA's fiscal crisis and subsequent long delays in the allocation of people's cash entitlements in 2019 (first transfer in May after a gap of 5 months) have put additional strain on the ability of vulnerable communities to cope with unabated hardships and deprivations. In this vein, the uninterrupted monthly provision of WFP food assistance since the beginning of the year has acted as a fundamental stopgap measure against this shock, mitigating the impact of people's reduced purchasing power and increased use of coping mechanisms, including indebtedness, on their socioeconomic vulnerability.

This proposal focuses on supporting the food needs of all 120,000 non-refugees facing deep poverty and food-insecurity and enlisted in the PA's social protection programme.