The Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Palestine’s Gaza Strip continues, seeing hunger reach unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said in a statement.

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

MSF staff are receiving an increasing number of malnourished patients at our clinics, while they themselves struggle to find sufficient food.

At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, the number of people enrolled for malnutrition treatment has quadrupled since May 18, while rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone.

“This is not just hunger — it is deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities. The weaponisation of food to exert pressure on a civilian population must not be normalised. The Israeli authorities must allow food and aid supplies into Gaza at scale,” MSF added.

“We see the dire consequences of these shortages in Gaza on a daily basis in our clinic,” project coordinator at the MSF clinic in Gaza City, Caroline Willemen, said. “We are now enrolling 25 new patients every single day for malnutrition. We see the exhaustion and the hunger in our own colleagues.”