As Israel’s latest siege of Gaza stretches into its third month, tens of thousands of children are starving, health and nutrition groups working in the region have warned. The alarm is growing by the day as existing supplies run out and new shipments remain blocked at border crossings. “We are breaking the bodies and the minds of the children of Gaza,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergencies Program. “We are starving the children of Gaza. If we don’t do something about it, we are complicit in what is happening before our very eyes.”
Children, alongside the elderly and pregnant women, are bearing the brunt of Israeli attacks. At the beginning of April, weeks into Israel’s latest blockade, health and nutrition experts already warned of a new wave of deterioration in child health, wiping out progress made during the brief pause in attacks. By the time Israel collapsed the temporary ceasefire in mid-March, families were already forced to ration food again. Since then, the risk of outbreaks has grown, and the psychological toll on children, already severe, has been deepening, with expected long-term consequences.
“Conditions for children are absolutely desperate,” said Rachael Cummings of Save the Children at a press conference on May 2. “Every day I think, okay, it can’t get any worse – but every day it actually does.”
Read more: The unbelievable stories about the children of Gaza
While older children have lost all sense of structure and normalcy as schools were destroyed, health workers report lasting damage beginning even before birth. Prior to the latest escalation, doctors had already observed stunted growth and signs of malnutrition that could mark the health of an entire generation.
“Most of the cases that we see now, even the [babies delivered after the full nine-month term] have a low birth weight under 2.5 kilograms,” a pediatrician working with Al-Awda Association reported in April. “[There are] cases of miscarriage and bleeding that occur with [women] because they have anemia while they are pregnant, so all of this negatively affects their pregnancy.”
The situation is made even worse by continuous, violent displacement and the severing of access to food distribution points, with aid agencies warning that starvation is being used as a weapon. “Starvation is not just a lack of food,” said Ghada Alhaddad of Oxfam, speaking at the same conference as Cummings. “It represents a loss of dignity, a loss of hope, and of life itself.”
For Alhaddad and her colleagues, the motive behind the siege is clear: to make Gaza uninhabitable. “[Before April 26], we were already seeing skyrocketing rates of acute malnutrition,” said Gavin Kelleher of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Palestinians were already missing meals en masse, attempting to exchange bags of diapers for bags of lentils in sheer desperation in the face of hunger.”
Read more: In Gaza, fifteen children disabled a day in Israeli attacks
Food prices have become astronomical: a single bag of flour now costs around USD 350, according to Alhaddad, who is based in Gaza herself. This food crisis, driven by the Israeli blockade, has also triggered what activists describe as survival-driven looting, behavior that was absent when aid was entering the Strip. “What is happening now is the manufactured breakdown of civil order,” said Kelleher. “This is what happens when you deny people access to the things they need to survive for themselves and their families.”
As Israeli authorities announced plans to seize control of aid distribution, humanitarian organizations warned that this could be used as a new tool to exclude entire communities from food and medicine. As these agencies have publicly opposed such intentions, their growing frustration with Western governments’ silence and complicity in the ongoing genocide is increasingly evident.
“Any right-thinking human being will stand up and say, this just must stop,” said WHO’s Ryan of the situation in Gaza. “As a physician, I’m angry, and I’m angry with myself that I’m not doing enough, I’m angry with everyone here, I’m angry with you, I’m angry with the world. This is an abomination.”
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.
