Gaza Herald- Nine-year-old Mariam Dawas, a Palestinian child from Gaza, has lost more than half her body weight amid Israel’s ongoing siege and war, as international agencies warn of an accelerating malnutrition crisis affecting Gaza’s youngest and most vulnerable.
Seated beside her 33-year-old mother, Madalla, in the devastated Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Mariam is now a shadow of her former self. Her mother, who now lives in a displacement camp in northern Gaza, recounts that her daughter was once healthy, weighing 25 kilograms before the war. Today, Mariam weighs just 10 kilograms, her body emaciated by months of hunger and deprivation.
UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director, Ted Chaiban, confirmed that the crisis in Gaza has surpassed the famine threshold, warning that one in every three people in the Strip now goes days without eating. Meanwhile, Al-Shifa Medical Complex reported seven starvation-related deaths in just 24 hours, including one child, victims of what has been widely described as Israel’s policy of starvation warfare.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the death toll from starvation has now reached 175, with at least 93 of those being children. Despite the urgent need for humanitarian aid, only 36 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip on Saturday. Most were looted or lost in what the Government Media Office described as a deliberate campaign of “engineered chaos,” orchestrated by Israeli authorities to destabilize and fragment aid distribution efforts.
On July 27, the World Health Organization issued a grave warning that malnutrition among Gaza’s population had reached crisis levels, endangering hundreds of thousands, especially children.
Instead of supporting coordinated international relief, Tel Aviv has implemented an alternative aid delivery system through the Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an entity launched on May 27 and backed by both Israel and the US. The mechanism, rejected by the United Nations, operates outside its oversight and has been widely condemned by Palestinians who view it as a means to corral the population and facilitate forced displacement and eventual Israeli reoccupation.
The Ministry of Health reported earlier Saturday that since the launch of this controversial aid mechanism, at least 1,422 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to access food, with over 10,000 others wounded.
Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli assault on Gaza backed and armed by the United States has resulted in over 209,000 Palestinian deaths and injuries, most of them women and children. More than 10,000 remain missing, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and famine continues to claim innocent lives in what many are calling a genocidal campaign.
As the world watches in silence, Gaza’s children waste away not from natural disaster, but from a deliberate, man-made siege that weaponizes hunger against an already shattered people. The international community’s failure to intervene meaningfully has emboldened Israel to continue its genocidal campaign with impunity. Palestinians are not merely victims of war; they are survivors of a systematic effort to erase their existence. Yet, even in the face of starvation, displacement, and death, their resilience endures. What Gaza needs is not charity filtered through military agendas, but justice, protection, and the full restoration of Palestinian rights, beginning with an end to the siege and occupation.
