AT LEAST one quarter of Gaza’s population — 576,000 Palestinians — are just one step away from famine and virtually the entire population desperately needs food, top United Nations officials said on Tuesday.

Officials from the UN humanitarian office and the UN’s food and agricultural organisations warned that all 2.3 million people in the besieged enclave face crisis-levels of food insecurity or worse, as well as a breakdown in civil order in the north, where food and other humanitarian supplies are all but non-existent.

The organisation’s humanitarian co-ordinator, Ramesh Ramasingham, told the UN security council that there is every possibility for further deterioration of the situation in Gaza.