The hunger that has been building among Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians has passed a tipping point and is accelerating deaths, aid workers and health staff say.
Not only Palestinian children – usually the most vulnerable – are falling victim to Israel’s blockade since March, but also adults.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme says nearly 100,000 women and children urgently need treatment for malnutrition, and almost a third of people in Gaza are “not eating for days”. Medical workers say they have run out of many key treatments and medicines.
The World Health Organization reports a sharp rise in malnutrition and disease, with a large proportion of Gaza’s residents now starving.
Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, says a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished, blaming Israel’s “deliberate use of starvation as a weapon”.