Haitham Imad/EPA
Osama al-raqab, five, suffers from severe malnutrition.
Delayed in growth, intellectual and motor disabled with weakened sensory capabilities, more vulnerable to diseases, dwarfs. This is the picture of the generation of children from the Gaza range that science – and Israel – paint.
Osama al-raqab, the boy in the picture above, is 5 years old: almost as many as pounds, which are only 9.
Lack of food and despair forced Osama’s mother to take him to Nasser Hospital in Khan Youis in southern Gaza, where all 2.1 million people are now at risk of passing fome19 months after Israel begins its offensive in the track. Canned people do not help their cystic fibrosis.
“With hunger in Gaza, we only eat canned lentils,” his mother said a month ago to the agency: “If the borders remain closed, until that we will lose.”
Osama is one of thousands of children who are victims of severe prolonged malnutrition who already take scars to life, although some have never even seen daylight. Severe food and medicine scarcity is pushing them to chronic malnutritionwhich will have short and long -term devastating consequences, warn health specialists and humanitarian agencies.
The lack of essential nutrients will leave many of these children permanently affected by delays in physical and mental development, including dwarf, weakening of the immune system e greater vulnerability to infectious diseases such as pneumonia e diarrheatwo of the largest causes of child death in the world.
Babies and current fetuses, if they survive, face particularly harsh predictions. Maternal malnutrition during pregnancy irreversibly affects brain development in the womb and maternal malnutrition also leads to a higher rate of premature birthsdue to the weakening of the placental function.
Premature babies face more lifelong risks, including intellectual and motor deficiencies, Growth Delay e weakening of sensory capabilities.
The damage already caused are lasting and, at the outset, irreversible “Or at least” they can persist for five or six decades, “warns the obstetrician and gynecologist at the University School of Medicine at Ain Shams, Egypt, Alaa Elfeky, Ao.
Nearly 470,000 people in Gaza will face “catastrophic” hunger levels until the end of September. This is the most severe level on the food insecurity scale, the UN Food Security Classification Framework.
UNICEF for Palestine that is running out of nutritional supplies. “At the beginning of 2025 it was estimated that approximately 60,000 children needed treatment; today, the vast majority of children in Gaza face severe food deprivation,” says the organization’s director of communications, Jonathan Crickx.
The block to the food input persists. Right now, 116 000 metric tons Food help are retained in trucks in the emergency corridors. It would be enough to feed one million people for four months, but Israel does not let vehicles help the needy Palestinians.
Although Israel has recently relieved an 11 -week blockade, allowing about 90 humanitarian aid trucks in Gaza last week, aid remains extremely insufficient.
We have known for months that getting worse this scenario is the fact that the medical infrastructure in Gaza is entering collapsewith overcrowded neonatal units-with up to five newborns to share a single incubator-and hospitals overloaded and without resources.
At Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, for example, 85% of medicines are over and there are no food as basic as bread, reveals the director of the hospital unit, Suhaib al-hams. Here, “ Most people are anémic“This is why the hospital can no longer find enough blood donors to attend to about 4,000 daily patients.
The war in Gaza has already victimized and has no end in sight. More than 93% of children in the track, about 930,000, are currently at risk of starving, according to the UN.
Tomás Guimarães, Zap //
