The 10-year-old boy who has become the face of famine in Gaza

That echoed a report from an aid group, ActionAid, which said a doctor at the Al-Awda maternity hospital in northern Gaza had told the group that malnourished mothers were delivering stillborn children.

Yazan’s parents had struggled for months to care for their son, whose condition, experts say, would have left him with difficulty swallowing and requiring a soft, nutritious diet. After the Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, his parents fled their home and took Yazan and their three other sons to a place they hoped would be safer.

Then they fled again, and again, and again, his father said, in search of a better place for Yazan, whose condition meant he could not tolerate the chaotic, unsanitary shelters. Any movement was complicated by the fact that Yazan could not walk.

His parents could do little but watch as his health steadily deteriorated.

“Day by day I saw my son getting weaker,” said his father, Shareef Kafarneh, a 31-year-old taxi driver from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.

They eventually ended up in Al-Awda, in the southern city of Rafah, where Yazan died on Monday morning. According to Dr. Jabr al-Shaer, a pediatrician who treated him, he suffered from both malnutrition and a respiratory infection. Dr. al-Shaer blamed the lack of food for weakening Yazan’s already weak immune system.

Obtaining enough food had been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had done so need food aidAbout 0.8 percent of children under the age of five in Gaza were acutely malnourished, according to the United Nations, according to the World Health Organization.

Five months into the war, that appears to have peaked: About 15 percent of Gazan children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, as are about 5 percent in the south, the World Health Organization said in February. With half of all children in Gaza being fed formula, Dr. Stobaugh says, Gaza’s lack of clean water to make formula is exacerbating the crisis.

Adele Khodr, Middle East director at UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, said this week: “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”

The situation has left parents in panic.

Ali Qannan, 34, does not know what is wrong with his 13-month-old son Ahmed, who is being treated at the European Hospital in southern Gaza. That includes the doctors at the five hospitals he has taken Ahmed to since the baby developed a swollen belly, diarrhea and vomiting a month after the war began. Ahmed has continued to deteriorate, with breathing problems and worrying blood tests, but given the war, doctors say they cannot perform the appropriate diagnostic tests, Mr Qannan said.

Every pediatrician has had a different suggestion for what to feed Ahmed, Mr. Qannan said — boiled potatoes, bread, a special fortified formula for treating severely malnourished children — but each suggestion was either impossible to find or didn’t seem to help. Mr Qannan says he is certain malnutrition has something to do with Ahmed’s problems.