Samantha Power, the director of the US Agency for International Development, has said that people in parts of northern Gaza have begun facing famine, Al Jazeera reports.

Her comments, made at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, mark the first public admission by a US official that famine has begun in parts of the Gaza Strip.

“Food has not flowed in sufficient quantities to avoid this imminent famine in the south, and these conditions that are giving rise already to child deaths in the north,” she said during an exchange with Congressman Joaquin Castro.