Gaza: MSF finds 1 in 4 young children and pregnant women malnourished as Israel's policy of starvation continues
Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warns.
MSF staff are receiving an increasing number of malnourished patients at our clinics, while they themselves struggle to find sufficient food. Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women, at MSF facilities last week, 25 per cent were malnourished. At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, the number of people enrolled for malnutrition has quadrupled since 18 May, while rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone.
This is not just hunger - it’s deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities. The weaponisation of food to exert pressure on a civilian population must not be normalised. Israeli authorities must allow food and aid supplies into Gaza at scale.
“We see the dire consequences of these shortages in Gaza on a daily basis in our clinic,” says Caroline Willemen, project coordinator at the MSF clinic in Gaza City. “We are now enrolling 25 new patients every single day for malnutrition. We see the exhaustion and the hunger in our own colleagues.”
Meanwhile, attacks continue at food distribution sites, where the Israeli proxy distribution scheme, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), is killing hundreds of people seeking desperately needed aid.
“What we are seeing is unconscionable; an entire population being deliberately cut off from food and water, all while the Israeli forces commit daily massacres as people scramble for scraps of food at distribution sites. Any shred of dignity that existed in Gaza has been wiped out in the ongoing genocide,” says Amande Bazerolle, MSF head of emergency response in Gaza.
In the last two months, more than 1,000 people have been killed and over 7,200 injured, according to the Ministry of Health, as they attempted to collect aid, including a large proportion at the distribution sites of the GHF, which is backed and funded by the US government. Despite these sites being set up to avoid aid diversion, they have done nothing to reduce the existence of looting.
“These food distributions are not humanitarian aid, they are war crimes committed in broad daylight and presented to the world with compassionate language. Those who go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's food distributions know that they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head,” says Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF deputy medical coordinator in Gaza.
In addition to people wounded at GHF sites, our teams have treated dozens of patients from recurrent massacres by Israeli forces as people wait for flour from trucks that pass by.