Severe malnutrition among young children in Gaza is increasing rapidly, says UNICEF

Children in the Gaza Strip are facing severe and rapidly increasing food shortages, and an alarming number are suffering from the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, United Nations experts said Friday in their most dire assessment yet of the evolving crisis.

About one in 20 children in shelters and health centers in northern Gaza experience “severe wasting,” the most critical sign of malnutrition, defined as dangerously thin for their height, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The findings were based on screenings conducted by the agency and issued on Friday.

Among children under the age of two, acute malnutrition, meaning the body is deprived of essential nutrients, has become quite common in Gaza, the screenings showed, with the most severe prevalence in northern Gaza. In some areas, it emerged that the number of cases of acute malnutrition had doubled since the last record in January.

Even in Rafah, the densely populated area in southern Gaza with the greatest access to food, 10 percent of children under the age of 2 are acutely malnourished and 4 percent are severely wasted.

Before the war, UNICEF said, the rate of acute malnutrition among young children was less than 1 percent, and severe wasting was extremely rare.

Lucia Elmi, UNICEF’s Special Representative in the Palestinian Territories, who returned from Gaza last week, said she was particularly alarmed by not only the number of children suffering from malnutrition, but also the speed at which their health was deteriorating. Young children cannot be adequately fed with just water, flour and bread, she said.

“They need protein, they need vitamins, they need fresh produce and they need micronutrients, and all of this is completely missing,” Ms. Elmi said in an interview last week. “That’s why the decline has been so rapid, so fast and on this scale.”

Children are bearing the extreme costs of the war in Gaza, both physically and mentally, children’s rights groups and experts reiterate. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 12,000 children have been killed in the conflict and 27 children in northern Gaza have died from malnutrition or dehydration.

Palestinian parents say their daily struggle, besides the threat of bombings, is finding enough food for their children. Many have said they choose to give what little they have to their children rather than to themselves.

United Nations Population Fund representative for Palestine Dominic Allen, who just returned from a trip to Gaza, said Friday that conditions there were worse than he could “describe or show in pictures or imagine.” . He said at a news conference in Jerusalem that everyone he saw or spoke to was “thin, emaciated and hungry.”

“The situation is beyond catastrophic,” he said.

Israel has said it will not limit the amount of aid entering Gaza through border crossings, and has recently expressed support for new initiatives to get aid into Gaza by land, air and sea. Humanitarian groups have criticized Israel, saying its insistence on checking every truckload of aid – and rejecting some – is a major cause of the food shortage.

The CEO of Save the Children, an aid organization in the United States, Janti Soeripto, said the crisis is currently by far the worst in the world for children.

“Every time I talk about Gaza, I think to myself that it couldn’t get any worse,” she said in an interview. “And every week I’m proven wrong.”

Without a ceasefire, it has been difficult for teams to provide safe and comprehensive assistance to the Palestinians.

Rachael Cummings, director of humanitarian public health for Save the Children in the United Kingdom, said from Rafah that the lack of sanitation – including dirty or salty water and sewage on the streets – was exacerbating the hunger crisis there.

“If a child doesn’t eat enough food or the right composition of food — they have poor water, poor sanitation — they’re going to get very sick very quickly,” she said.