A least 150 people last month starved to death in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region amid a near-complete blockade of food aid by federal and allied authorities, the Tigray forces have said, while half a million people face famine conditions.
The starvation deaths occurred in six communities, as well as in camps for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDP) in the town of Shire, the Tigray External Affairs Office said in a briefing late on Monday.
It is the largest public assessment yet of starvation deaths, although The Associated Press reported at least 125 deaths in a single district earlier this year.
Photo: AP
Food aid ran out last month in Tigray, a region of 6 million people, as the UN has described intense searches and delays of humanitarian cargo by Ethiopian authorities who feared that aid would reach the Tigray forces, who have been fighting Ethiopian and allied forces for the past 10 months after a political falling-out.
“The complete depletion of food stocks has meant that IDP camps are receiving no aid and host communities, now running out of food themselves, are no longer able to support them,” the Tigray statement said.
A spokeswoman for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the government has asserted that aid is reaching Tigray, and blames Tigray forces and insecurity for any problems.
The International Organization for Migration, which has said that more than 2 million people are displaced in Tigray, did not immediately respond to a question about starvation deaths, but the agency last month said that “hosting capacity appears to have reached its limit” by the local population who support the majority of them.
The first aid convoy in more than two weeks arrived in the Tigray regional capital, Mekele, on Monday, but the World Food Programme (WFP) has said that a convoy of about 100 trucks is needed to arrive every day to meet the urgent needs of more than 5 million people.
Telecommunications, electricity and banking services have again been cut off to Tigray since the Tigray forces retook much of the region in June.
While witnesses have said that access inside the region is safer and easier, they added that dwindling supplies of food, fuel and cash make it increasingly impossible to help the hungry.
The war has since spread into Ethiopia’s Amhara and Afar regions, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Facilities supported by the International Committee for the Red Cross in those regions “have been receiving an increasing number of wounded people in the past few weeks,” the Red Cross said on Tuesday.
“Unless the fighting dies down, we can only see the situation deteriorating extensively in the next weeks or months,” WFP spokesman Gordon Weiss said. “We knew that there were about 400,000 people on the edge of famine-like conditions [in Tigray] in June... We can expect that that population has grown and that their conditions have deteriorated.”
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