NUSEIRAT: As malnutrition surges in war-torn Gaza, tens of thousands of children and women require urgent treatment, according to the UN, while aid enters the blockaded Palestinian territory at a trickle.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said it has noted a rising number of infant deaths caused by “severe hunger and malnutrition,” reporting at least three such deaths in the past week.
“These heartbreaking cases were not caused by direct bombing but by starvation, the lack of baby formula and the absence of basic health care,” civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
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MSF said that patients at its Gaza clinics do not heal properly from their wounds due to protein deficiency.
Ziad Musleh, a 45-year-old father displaced from Gaza’s north to the central city of Nuseirat, said: “We are dying, our children are dying and we can’t do anything to stop it.”
“Our children cry and scream for food. They go to sleep in pain, in hunger, with empty stomachs. There is absolutely no food.
“And if by chance a small amount appears in the market, the prices are outrageous — no one can afford it.”
At a food distribution site in a UN-school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat on Sunday, children entertained themselves by banging on their plates as they waited for their turn.
Several of them had faces stretched thin by hunger, a journalist reported.
Umm Sameh Abu Zeina, whose cheekbones protruded from her thin face as she waited for food in Nuseirat, said she had lost 35 kg.
“We do not eat enough. I don’t eat, I leave the food I receive for my daughter,” she said, adding that she had a range of health conditions, including high blood pressure and diabetes.
Gazans as well as the UN and aid organizations frequently complain that depleted stocks have sent prices skyrocketing for what little food is available in the markets.
WFP condemns violence at food distribution points
In northern Gaza on Sunday, the Health Ministry, witnesses and a UN official said Israeli forces opened fire toward crowds who tried to get food from a 25-truck convoy that had entered the hard-hit area.
The World Food Program statement, which said the crowd surrounding its convoy “came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire,” backs up those claims. The statement did not specify a death toll, saying only the incident resulted in the loss of “countless lives.”
“These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation,” it said, adding that the incident occurred despite assurances from Israeli authorities that aid delivery would improve. “Shootings near humanitarian missions, convoys and food distributions must stop immediately.”
