Children so malnourished that ‘feeding no longer helps’
Caroline Willemen, project coordinator at an MSF clinic in Gaza City, says a quarter of the children screened there are malnourished, with 25 new cases admitted for urgent care each day.
The malnourished children are given fortified peanut paste – a nutrient-rich, low-cost emergency food – to help them “gain some strength”, Willemen told Al Jazeera. But in severe cases, “just feeding them is not enough.”
“Their body will have shut down to such an extent that normal feeding no longer helps, so they need specialised care that at the moment we are not equipped to give, unfortunately,” she explained. “It’s extremely difficult to help, especially the small children who have already gotten to that point.”
“I never could have considered when I arrived a month ago [to Gaza] that a situation that was already apocalyptic … would get even worse,” Willemen said.
‘Every one of my colleagues is hungry’, says humanitarian in Gaza
Caroline Willemen, a Gaza City-based project coordinator with MSF, says the hunger crisis in the enclave extends even to her own colleagues.
“Every single one of my colleagues is hungry,” she told Al Jazeera. “Last week, there were a few days where there was absolutely nothing in the market. Many of them [my colleagues] came to work not having eaten for 24 or 48 hours.”
“Even [for people who have a salary], when there is nothing in the market, there is nothing you can do,” she said.
While a community kitchen her colleagues can access has begun offering a small portion of rice in recent days, Willemen said they are likely to give most of that food to their hungry children. “I know for a fact that many of my colleagues will not eat that rice because they have hungry children at home, so they will take that rice and feed their children instead,” she said.
