One in five children in Gaza City is malnourished and cases are increasing every day, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency says. The UN has warned that the level of aid getting into Gaza is “a trickle” and the hunger crisis in the territory “has never been so dire”. More than 100 people, the vast majority of them children, have reportedly died of hunger.
Most children are emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need. Unrwa workers are “increasingly fainting from hunger while at work”. The World Health Organisation said a large proportion of the population of Gaza was “starving”.
Israel stopped aid deliveries to Gaza in early March following a two-month ceasefire. The blockade was partially eased after nearly two months, but food, fuel and medicine shortages worsened. According to the UN human rights office, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get food aid over the past two months.
At least 766 of them have been killed in the vicinity of one of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s four distribution centres. Another 288 people have been reported killed near UN and other aid convoys. Israel has accused Hamas of instigating the chaos near the aid sites.
Najah, a 19-year-old widow sheltering in a hospital in Gaza, said she fears she would “get shot” if she travelled to an aid distribution site. A doctor working in Gaza with a UK medical charity said Gaza was not close to famine, but already “living it”. Abu Alaa, a market seller in Gaza, said he and his children “go to bed hungry every night”.
Walaa Fathi, who is eight months pregnant with her third child, said Gazans are “experiencing a catastrophe and a famine that no one could have imagined”.
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