MSF finds 1 in 4 young children and pregnant women malnourished as Israel's policy of starvation continues in Gaza

• Across our facilities in Gaza last week, 25 per cent of children and pregnant women screened for malnutrition were malnourished.
• What is happening in Gaza is the deliberate starvation of people, manufactured by the Israeli authorities.
• The Israeli authorities must allow food and aid supplies into Gaza at scale.

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, Doctors Without Borders (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, hundreds of people seeking desperately needed aid continue to be attacked by Israeli forces and private security contractors at food distribution sites run by the Israeli proxy, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). 

“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 humanity 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.
 

“In the emergency room of Sheikh Radwan clinic a few days ago, dozens of patients came in, both dead and wounded,” says Willeman. “These were people who had approached trucks for flour and were ruthlessly shot by Israeli forces.

That day MSF and Ministry of Health medical teams at the clinic, in north Gaza, treated 122 people with gunshot wounds who had been fired on while waiting for flour and additional 46 people were dead on arrival.

To make matters worse, in the last week, community kitchens who provide food to patients and medical staff in hospitals have struggled to do so, some shutting down for days at a time. Even if they can deliver, it is only one meal a day of plain rice for patients who need nutrient-rich food to heal properly, and often nothing for staff. This is no longer about what people can afford. There is barely any food available in most of the strip.