Deaths from hunger rise in Gaza

MASS STARVATION FEARS

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AFTER four months of a near-total Israeli siege, Gaza’s few remaining hospitals now have wards for the growing number of malnourished children whose tiny bodies are just the width of their bones.

Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics.

For months, aid agencies had warned of the coming crisis, as Israel halted the flow of aid to the Gaza Strip before attempting to replace UN relief efforts with distribution points inside military zones. It was a move Israeli officials said was aimed at pressuring Hamas, whose fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.

But testimonies from doctors, relief workers and Gazans this week make it clear that a worst-case scenario is finally unfolding: Nearly one in three people are going multiple days without eating, according to the UN, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation.

In a video filmed Tuesday inside Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, families fretted over babies with distended bellies and tiny fists that they clenched as they cried.

The Gaza Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 10 people had died of starvation in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of those killed by hunger to 111 since the start of the war. Among them was 6-week-old Yousef al-Safadi, so small in photographs from the silver table of the hospital morgue that the white sleepsuit peeled back to show his jutting ribs dwarfed his slight body.

The International Rescue Committee, a global relief and development organisation, said on Wednesday that its teams had reported an increase in the number of children being rushed to hospitals because of malnutrition in recent days.