Ibrahim al-Najjar is still mourning the death of his 5-year-old son, Naim, who succumbed to malnutrition amid Gaza’s deepening humanitarian crisis. A year has passed, but the pain remains raw – and now, he fears another son may soon follow.
“This child will be next,” said Najjar, pointing to 10-year-old Farah. “He’s been losing consciousness for about a month. He used to be twice this size.”
Once a taxi driver, the 43-year-old father held up a medical certificate confirming Naim died on March 28, 2024 – another casualty in a war that has uprooted his family and shattered their lives.
Before the conflict erupted in October 2023, after Hamas' incursion into southern Israel, the Najjars lived a modest but stable life, eating three meals a day.
Now, even basic foods like bread, rice, fruit and vegetables are beyond reach – distant memories in a land battered by nearly two years of relentless Israeli airstrikes.
Naim’s older brother, 20-year-old Adnan, has taken on the role of caregiver.
He wakes each day at 5:30 a.m., navigating Gaza’s rubble-strewn streets in search of a soup kitchen – his family’s only hope for survival as the war rages around them.
“I swear I don’t have salt at home, I swear I beg for a grain of salt,” said Naim’s mother, Najwa, 40.
“People talk about Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. Come see the children of Gaza. Those who do not believe, come see how Gaza’s children are dying. We are not living – we are dying slowly,” she said.
Five more people died of malnutrition and starvation in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, the enclave’s Health Ministry said Wednesday, raising the number of deaths from such causes to at least 193 Palestinians – including 96 children – since the war began.
A global hunger monitor has said a famine scenario is unfolding in the Gaza Strip, with starvation spreading, children under 5 dying of hunger-related causes, and humanitarian access to the embattled enclave severely restricted.
Warnings about starvation and malnutrition from aid agencies continue to mount.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said food consumption across Gaza has declined to its lowest level since the onset of the war.
81% of households in the tiny, crowded coastal territory of 2.2 million people reported poor food consumption – up from 33% in April.
“Nearly nine out of 10 households resorted to extremely severe coping mechanisms to feed themselves, such as taking significant safety risks to obtain food and scavenging from the garbage,” OCHA said in a statement.
Even when Palestinians are not too weak to access aid collection points, they remain vulnerable to injury or death in the crush to secure food.
Between June and July, the number of admissions for malnutrition nearly doubled – from 6,344 to 11,877 – according to the latest UNICEF figures available.
Meanwhile, there is no sign of a cease-fire on the horizon, although Israel’s military chief has pushed back against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to seize areas of Gaza not already under Israeli control, according to three Israeli officials.
Netanyahu has vowed no end to the war until the annihilation of Hamas, which killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage in its Oct. 7 attack.
Israel’s genocidal military response has killed more than 60,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities, and turned Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated areas, into a sea of ruins, with many feared buried beneath the rubble.
Holding her emaciated baby, Ammar, who she said is wasting away from malnutrition, Amira Muteir, 32, pleaded with the world to come to the rescue.
“The shadow of death is threatening him because of hunger,” she said, adding that he often goes 15 or 20 days a month without milk, leaving her to wait hours at a hospital for fortified solution.
Sometimes, she said, he is forced to drink polluted water due to a severe shortage of clean sources.
Muteir, her husband and their children rely on a charity soup kitchen that provides one small plate of food a day. “We eat it throughout the day, and until the following day we eat nothing else,” she said.
