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A malnourished two-year-old child at his family home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, in Gaza City.Photograph by Jehad Alshrafi / AP |
"October 18, 2025
A few weeks ago, Soliman Zyad, a young health-care worker in northern Gaza, told me that his family was near starvation. On some days, he and his uncle AbdulKareem walked in search of food from 3 A.M. until the afternoon. “We swore we would not return home without finding flour,” Zyad told me. “People were ready to risk their lives for a single sack.” Almost forty per cent of the population was going days at a time without eating, according to the World Health Organization. Sometimes AbdulKareem would vomit from hunger and fatigue. His wife, pregnant with twins, was severely anemic.
The latest food shortage in Gaza began in March, when Israel ended a ceasefire and imposed a blockade on all aid that lasted eleven weeks. After that, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was backed by Israel and the U.S., began distributing limited amounts of aid; around three thousand Palestinians were killed while seeking food. This month, a United Nations study published in The Lancet reported that more than fifty-four thousand children are malnourished in Gaza. “Every family, by now, has been affected,” John Kahler, a pediatrician and a co-founder of MedGlobal, a humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza, told me. About one in five babies was born premature or underweight. MedGlobal cared for one infant, Rafeef, who weighed just four pounds at birth. Her mother was too malnourished to breast-feed; the baby cried constantly, began losing weight, and developed ulcers and infections. On August 18th, she died.
“We live day by day,” Eyad Amawi, a father of four who works as an aid coördinator in Gaza, told me in September. “We have just enough to survive, but not enough to carry out our normal activities.” On the black market, the price of a kilogram of flour—about ten cents before October 7, 2023—had risen to thirty-five dollars, when it could be found at all. Amawi often saw malnourished children who lacked the strength to play. He worried that months of famine had already inflicted irreversible damage. “We are losing the next generation,” he said. “They will suffer for all their lives from this.”.... "READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-comes-after-starvation-in-gaza