Famine has afflicted at least 350,000 people in northern Ethiopia’s conflict-ravaged Tigray region, a starvation calamity bigger at the moment than anywhere else in the world, the United Nations and international aid groups said Thursday. With their joint announcement, the humanitarian officials for the first time described the unfolding crisis in Tigray as a famine and specified the number of people suffering from it. They had warned for weeks of an impending disaster from the conflict in Ethiopia, the most populous country in the Horn of Africa.
