• MSF says its clinics receiving overwhelming number of malnourished patients
• Healthcare workers also fighting to survive Israel’s ‘policy of starvation’

ROME/GENEVA: The UN’s food aid agency says that around a third of people in Gaza are “not eating for days”, while the world’s main medical charity has warned a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) blamed Israel’s “policy of starvation”, saying that their deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive.

The World Food Programme (WFP), meanwhile, says the food crisis in Gaza has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation”.

WFP had previously warned of a “critical risk of famine” in war-raged Gaza, over which international condemnation of Israel’s actions has been growing.

“Nearly one person in three is not eating for days. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment,” a WFP statement said.

It said that 470,000 people are expected to face “catastrophic hunger” — the most critical category under the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase classification — between May and September this year.“Food aid is the only way for people to access any food as food prices are through the roof,” the WFP said.

“People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance.”

Aid groups have warned of surging numbers of malnourished children in Gaza, which Israel placed under an aid blockade in March.

Policy of starvation

In a statement, MSF said its staff in the besieged and war-torn Palestinian territory were receiving growing numbers of malnourished patients.

“Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent were malnourished,” it said.

At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, it said the number of people needing care for malnutrition had quadrupled since mid-May, while “rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone”.

“This is not just hunger,” the organisation said. “It’s deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities.”

Warning that there is now “barely any food available in most of the Strip”, MSF insisted in its statement that “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.” MSF was among more than 100 aid and rights groups who warned this week that “mass starvation” was spreading in Gaza.

Although the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has tried to replace the old UN-backed aid system, the UN has refused to work with it.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2025