Severe malnutrition in under-5s has tripled at Gaza City clinic

Gaza: Rates of severe malnutrition among children aged under five at Médecins Sans Frontières’ Gaza City clinic have tripled in the last two weeks, the charity has said, as starvation in the Israeli-besieged strip worsens.The global aid community has sounded the alarm as Gaza descends deeper into mass starvation, with resulting deaths being reported daily as Israel allows only a trickle of aid into the territory.MSF said a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women it screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, with the number of people needing care for malnutrition at its Gaza City location quadrupling since May.MSF is one of the largest medical providers in Gaza, with more than 1,000 staff in the strip providing medical services ranging from maternity care to emergency surgery.The charity blamed what it called an Israeli “policy of starvation” for the hunger crisis, as global condemnation grows over what more than 100 aid groups say is Israel’s blockade of most aid into Gaza.“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,” MSF said in a statement on Friday.At least 122 people have died from starvation in Gaza, with nine more dying in the last 24 hours, according to health authorities.The World Food Programme on Friday said nearly a third of people in Gaza were not eating for days, and that the hunger crisis had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation”.“Nearly one person in three is not eating for days. Malnutrition is surging, with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment,” the WFP said in a statement.Naji al-Qurashali, an obstetrician-gynaecologist in Gaza, said statistics appeared to underestimate the true scale of the problem, estimating that 50% of the hundreds of pregnant women he saw each day were suffering from malnutrition.“The malnutrition situation is unimaginable. Throughout my entire medical career, I never expected, not even in my wildest dreams, that things would reach this level,” said Qurashali.Miscarriages had increased significantly among the patients he saw as mothers struggled to find food to feed themselves, he said. Those babies that were carried to term were significantly underweight and were increasingly born prematurely or with disfigurements.Qurashali said he lacked many of the medical supplies necessary to treat the malnourished women. He and other doctors were forced to use unsanitary medical gloves and prescribe expired medication to patients.“As a helpless doctor, it is an incredibly painful feeling,” he said. “Many times, I leave the hospital running, because I can’t bear the fact that I can’t meet even the simplest needs of these women.”Medical experts have said that society’s most vulnerable, children and pregnant women, are the first to die in mass hunger events.Israel has denied it is responsible for the hunger crisis in Gaza, with the foreign ministry calling it a “deliberate foreign ploy to defame Israel”, and blamed the UN for failing to distribute aid. The UN said it was operating as well as it could under Israeli restrictions, which prevent the UN-led aid system from using its 400 aid distribution points throughout the strip.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, accused the international community of sticking its head in the sand as Palestinians starved in Gaza, lambasting what he called a “lack of humanity”.“This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience. We will continue to speak out at every opportunity,” Guterres said on Friday.The leaders of the UK, France and Germany said in a joint statement on Friday that the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza “must end now” and called on the Israeli government to lift restrictions on aid.“We firmly oppose all efforts to impose Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories,” the leaders said, calling for an immediate ceasefire.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said late on Thursday that France would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN general assembly in September. The UK prime minister has come under pressure to do the same, with more than 100 MPs signing a letter demanding Keir Starmer follow suit.Macron had previously urged the UK to recognise a Palestinian state alongside France and is expected to try to enlist other European countries to do the same. Starmer called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “unspeakable and indefensible” in a post on X on Thursday, but said nothing about recognising a Palestinian state.