The UN published a report: 282 million people are hungry

The report, published on Wednesday, said that in 2023 the number of people facing acute hunger increased by 24 million compared to 2022 due to a sharp deterioration in food security, especially in the Gaza Strip and Sudan.

It is also emphasized that the UN has increased the number of countries in which it monitors food supply compared to 2022.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated in the introduction of that report that it represents "a call to arms of humanity's failures" and that "in a world of plenty, children are dying of hunger" and called for an immediate response by the international community to the findings of the report, which would include the transformation of the global food supply system and increase help the most vulnerable areas.

"The conflicts that have erupted in the last 12 months have led to a catastrophic global situation," Guterres said.

The chief economist of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Máximo Torero, said that 705,000 people in five countries are at stage five, the highest level on the scale of hunger determined by international experts, which is the highest number since the global report was compiled in 2016, and it quadrupled last year compared to that initial year.

More than 80 percent of the people facing hunger, 577,000 of them, are in the Gaza Strip, Torero said. According to him, thousands of people are facing catastrophic hunger in South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Mali.

According to UN estimates, about 1.1 million people in the Gaza Strip and 79,000 in South Sudan will face extreme hunger by July. It also points out that the conflict in Haiti will continue to affect food insecurity in that country, where armed gangs control a large part of the capital Port-au-Prince.