Malnutrition leaves six-month-old baby as ‘nothing but bones’
Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim Khalili visited al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza City, where Judi al-Arour, a six-month-old baby, is struggling to survive.
At six months old, she is supposed to weigh at least 6kg (13.2lb), but born into starvation in Gaza, to a mother severely malnourished during pregnancy, her life hangs in the balance, at only 2kg (4.4lb).
Dr Mayada Jundiyeh, head of the neonatal unit at al-Rantisi Hospital, told Khalili that “the next stage of harm, after weight loss and electrolyte imbalance, can lead to permanent brain damage.
“Even if nutritional supplements and proper food are later introduced to the children, they could already be in an irreparable state, meaning their brain and cognitive function would already have been affected,” Jundiyeh said.
Al-Arour’s grandmother, Um Ashraf al-Arour, says the family has done everything to care for her, but because Israel has blocked the entry of baby formula and food, her granddaughter has been left “extremely fragile” and “nothing but bones”.
Hospitals in Gaza, facing crucial shortages of baby formula and medicine, are trying to keep the babies and infants alive under extremely difficult conditions
Necessary volume of humanitarian aid not getting into Gaza: WFP
The UN food agency says it is not getting the necessary volumes of humanitarian assistance into Gaza despite Israel issuing new measures to enable more supplies to enter the enclave.
“We have not gotten the authorisation, the permission to move in the volumes that we’ve requested,” Ross Smith, a senior regional programme adviser at the WFP’s Regional Bureau for East and Central Africa, said.
Ross said the disaster unfolding in Gaza is “unlike anything we have seen in this century”, adding that it was reminiscent of famines seen in Ethiopia and Biafra, Nigeria, in the 20th century.
Reversing forced starvation ‘will need a lot more than a trickle of aid'
US President Donald Trump has contradicted Israeli claims that there is no starvation in Gaza.
But at the same time, he announced that the US and others would be setting up new aid distribution centres in Gaza – extending the patterns of accommodating Israeli demands to bypass the UN, which has 400 centres to distribute aid effectively and efficiently.
It’s part of a trend of reinventing the wheel of aid distribution in Gaza that has contributed to entrenching this catastrophic crisis, a crisis created by Israel by razing agricultural fields, prohibiting fishing, and obstructing UN aid agencies.
Now and again, Israel offers alternatives that do not resolve the crisis it created in the first place:
- Food air drops – inefficient and expensive, five air drops offer the equivalent of one truckload if the pellets fall within people’s reach without harming civilians in the process.
- The US and Israeli-backed GHF – set up to replace the UN, it’s a chaotic operation that turned into a “death trap” for more than 1,000 Palestinians.
Experts say the starvation Israel engineered took months to set in and that it will need a lot more than a trickle of aid over a few days to reverse.
Words and smokescreens will not stop the imminent threat of mass death by starvation in Gaza.
