The Guardian reports:

Mohammed’s skeletal arms stick out of a romper with a grinning emoji-face and the slogan “smiley boy”, which in a Gaza hospital reads as a cruel joke. He spends much of the day crying from hunger, or gnawing at his own emaciated fingers.

At seven months old, he weighs barely 4kg (9lbs) and this is the second time he has been admitted for treatment. His face is gaunt, his limbs little more than bones covered in baggy skin and his ribs protrude painfully from his chest.

“My biggest fear now is losing my grandson to malnutrition,” said his grandmother Faiza Abdul Rahman, who herself is constantly dizzy from lack of food. The previous day the only thing she ate was a single piece of pitta bread, which cost 15 shekels (£3).

“His siblings also suffer from severe hunger. On some days, they go to bed without a single bite to eat.”

Mohammed was born healthy but his mother was too malnourished to produce breast milk, and the family has only been able to get two cans of baby formula since.

The ward at the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society hospital is crowded with other skeletal children, some doubled up on the 12 beds. There are only two functioning paediatric teams left in Gaza City, and up to 200 children turn up daily seeking treatment.

Dr Musab Farwana spends his days trying, but often failing, to save them. Then he goes home to share meals that are too small with his own hungry sons and daughters.

The whole family are losing weight fast, because his salary buys almost nothing, and he doesn’t want to risk the deadly race for supplies handed out by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation after another medic, Dr Ramzi Hajaj, was killed trying to get food at one site. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports:

Doctors and medical staff in Gaza say their increasing hunger and the lack of available food is beginning to leave them too weak to provide urgent medical care to patients inside hospitals full of malnourished and injured civilians.

Almost a dozen medical staff across the territory have told the Guardian and the Arabic Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) of their increasingly desperate search for food and declining physical health due to hunger.

“They are in a state of extreme exhaustion. Some have fainted in the operating rooms,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, who said that like the people of Gaza, staff had not received any aid or had any meals in the past 48 hours.

“Medical services will be affected because our staff will not be able to hold out any longer in the face of this famine,” he added. [Continue reading…]