GazaHerald – Doctors in Gaza are warning that the combination of relentless bombardment, a crippling blockade, and mass starvation is pushing the health system beyond breaking point, leaving many patients with no realistic chance of survival.
Ahmed Yousef, a trauma specialist volunteering in the besieged enclave, described the harrowing scenes inside Gaza’s hospitals. With severe shortages of medical supplies and patients already weakened by extreme malnutrition, he said doctors are often powerless.
“Patients come, and doctors know if they have a certain level of injury, there’s nothing we can do,” Yousef explained.
“To face families in those last moments, knowing we can’t provide the care we’re trained to give, is devastating.”
He described widespread signs of starvation: “We see skin and bones, ribs, sunken eyes, temporal wasting … Everything you read about in textbooks on malnutrition, we see in every person, doctor, nurse, and patient. For those who have also suffered devastating injuries, their capacity to recover is close to zero.”
Starvation and Shortages
Medical staff at Al-Shifa Hospital confirmed that large numbers of patients are suffering from severe malnutrition, with the shortages extending even to drinking water and baby formula. They said the minimal aid entering the Strip reaches only a fraction of the population, leaving hundreds of patients at risk.
Doctors appealed for urgent international intervention to transfer critical cases out of Gaza and to supply essential medicines, supplements, and wound-healing treatments.
Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, warned that starvation and malnutrition were severely weakening immunity, especially among children, women, and the elderly. In Nuseirat camp, Al-Awda Hospital’s medical director, Yasser Shaban, said 80% of children admitted there are suffering from severe malnutrition, a figure he called catastrophic.
American physician Mark Brauner, who recently returned from Gaza, described the situation as “widespread genocide” and stressed the urgent need for the United Nations to be allowed to deliver aid by land.
He said the suffering on the ground was even worse than what the world sees in photos and videos. “I saw Palestinians dying and collapsing from starvation,” Brauner said, adding that real death rates from hunger are likely double current estimates.
Brauner described severe hunger symptoms, including nausea, dizziness, and organ failure, alongside a rise in infections and swelling linked to malnutrition, some of which are contagious and risk spreading rapidly in overcrowded conditions.
