Ashraf Abo Salla spent 21 months shielding his 11-year-old daughter Nour from Israeli bombardment, dodging bombs, shelling and snipers.
But there was one thing he couldn’t protect her from: hunger. Nour died of starvation caused by a brutal Israeli siege. Her father couldn’t find food, and the lentils they were given weren’t enough to keep her alive.
In a Gaza morgue, frail and hollow-eyed, he appeared consumed by guilt, though none of this was his doing. He didn’t cry, but his despair and anger were raw as he wrapped Nour’s skeletal body, her ribs and wrists clearly visible, in a blue sheet. Her clothes were still on: dirty jeans and a worn black blouse she seemed to have lived and died in.
“They trick us with a handful of lentils, but children need bread too. They need milk,” he told The National, in reference to the aid being distributed, which is given under the constant threat of being killed, by an Israel-US backed foundation. “She survived on the community kitchens, but those are gone now,” he added, standing in front of a cracked wall where a corner had been broken to make space for black plastic body bags.
More than 60,000 Palestinians, among them tens of thousands of children, have been killed by Israeli fire since the start of the war. Despite global outrage, Israel has refused to halt its bombardment, claiming it is targeting Hamas, but in the process it is destroying the lives and futures of hundreds of thousands of people.
Starvation is increasingly being used as a weapon of war, according to the UN. In recent weeks, dozens have died of hunger in the besieged coastal enclave, where even fishing is banned. A trickle of aid trucks has entered Gaza in the last few days, but the famine is spreading, and children like Nour are dying every day.
Cold marble table
Images emerging from Gaza show clinics crowded with starving people. Residents have begun posting their daily struggles on social media: a piece of bread shaped like a fish to trick children into believing it's a real fish; a single piece of fruit shared by a family of six; fava beans eaten like snacks.
“They just see us as images,” said the aunt of 13-year-old Remas Al Burdeene, speaking from a small clinic in Gaza. Remas’s life had been hard long before the famine. She lived with a disability in her legs and had endured war after war. This week, she died of hunger, too.
On a dark, cold marble table, her tiny legs peeked out from under a brown blanket. Nurses arrived to wrap her body in a white burial shroud. Before that, Dalia, her aunt, had covered her with her own blanket and held her one last time. The blanket had a drawing of a dark blue sky. “No one is doing anything to help us,” the aunt said, her body as thin as Remas’s.
On Tuesday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) issued an alert over the rise in hunger-related deaths in Gaza, warning that access to food and other essentials has plummeted to unprecedented levels. “Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip,” the IPC said in a report.
For Dr Khalil Al Dajran, of Al Aqsa Hospital, the worst is yet to come, despite international outrage and even US President Donald Trump acknowledging the starvation crisis and calling for Gaza’s children to be fed.
“Today we announced 14 more deaths due to malnutrition, raising the number of starvation deaths to 147, of which 88 are children,” he told The National. “We fear the number will increase in the coming days,” warned the doctor, who was speaking outside the hospital near a field clinic, as people waited on the pavement for news of loved ones.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to acknowledge the consequences of his decisions and his army’s siege policy. “There is no starvation in Gaza,” he claimed in a speech.
