Report Shows: Two Million Israelis Suffer Food Insecurity

YERUSHALAYIM
A young boy searches for food in a garbage container in downtown Yerushalayim. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Two million Israelis suffer from food insecurity and don’t have access to adequate quantities of nutritious foods, according to a reported published Wednesday by Israel’s largest anti-poverty non-governmental organization.

The report by the Latet NGO shows that 633,000 families in Israel don’t have enough resources to fulfill their daily dietary needs. Of the two million people in need of sufficient nutrition, 774,000 are children – which is one third of the kids in Israel.

Since start of the COVID pandemic, hundreds of thousands of families in Israel have been affected economically.

And while many Israelis even afford food, the government has allocated only NIS 100 million to deal with the issue after years of budgetary neglect, which at this point appears to be just a drop in the ocean.

A report by the Knesset Research and Information Center that was published last month said at the end of 2020, only 200,000 families suffered from food shortages, which is actually three times lower than the real figure. Therefore, when the numbers are so misleading, many families are left in distress without the state’s aid.

Latet Executive Director Eran Weintraub says that the onset of COVID-19 and the economic crisis that followed have worsen the distress of low-income families, who were suffering even before the pandemic.

“Although the government allocated NIS 100 million, the amount needed in order to solve this situation is about NIS 1 billion.”

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