Gaza hospital says 21 children dead from malnutrition and starvation

The head of Gaza’s largest hospital on Tuesday said 21 children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory in the past three days, while Israel pressed a devastating assault.

Gaza’s population of more than two million people is facing severe shortages of food and other essentials, with residents frequently killed as they try to collect humanitarian aid at a handful of distribution points.

“Twenty-one children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in various areas across the Gaza Strip,” Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza, told reporters.

Abu Salmiya said new cases of malnutrition and starvation were arriving at Gaza’s remaining functioning hospitals “every moment” warning there could be “alarming numbers” of deaths due to starvation.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gaza a “horror show” in a speech on Tuesday, with “a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times”.

After talks to extend a six-week ceasefire broke down, Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza on March 2 this year, allowing nothing in until trucks were again permitted to enter at a trickle in late May.

However, stocks accumulated during the ceasefire have gradually depleted, leaving the territory’s inhabitants experiencing the worst shortages since the start of the war in October 2023.

Chaotic scenes have become frequent at aid distribution areas since the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation effectively sidelined a vast UN aid delivery network in Gaza.

The UN on Tuesday said Israeli forces had killed over 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid since the GHF began its operations in late May, with most near the foundation’s sites.

Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani posted a video online on Tuesday evening, showing what he said was “950 trucks worth of aid currently waiting in Gaza for international organisations to pick up and distribute”.

“This is after Israel facilitated the aid entry into Gaza,” he wrote on X.

Latest attacks

Earlier Tuesday, Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes had killed 15 people, after the World Health Organization said Israel attacked its facilities amid its expanding ground operations.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that Israeli strikes on the Al-Shati camp west of Gaza City had killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 50.

Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced at least once during the conflict and the Al-Shati camp — on the Mediterranean coast — hosts thousands of people displaced from the north in tents and makeshift shelters.

Raed Bakr, 30, lives with his three children and said he heard “a massive explosion” at about 1:40 am on Tuesday (2240 GMT Monday), which blew their tent away.

“I felt like I was in a nightmare. Fire, dust, smoke and body parts flying through the air, dirt everywhere. The children were screaming,” Bakr, whose wife was killed last year, told AFP.

Reports of the latest death toll came as the Roman Catholic church’s most senior cleric in the Holy Land, Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “morally unacceptable”.

Pizzaballa spent three days in Gaza after an Israeli strike on the territory’s only Catholic church last Thursday which killed three people.

New ground operations

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus accused Israeli troops of entering its staff residence, and forcing women and children to evacuate, as they handcuffed, stripped and interrogated male staff at gunpoint.

Israeli forces meanwhile expanded ground operations in Deir el-Balah following intense shelling of the area in central Gaza on Monday.

The civil defence agency’s Bassal said two people were killed in Deir el-Balah.

The Israeli military said later its troops “identified shots being fired toward them in the Deir al-Balah area, and responded toward the area from which the shooting originated”.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 people were living in the area, which until now had been considered relatively safe.

Some 30,000 were living in displacement sites.

OCHA said nearly 88 percent of the entire Gaza Strip was now either under evacuation orders or within Israeli militarised zones, forcing the population of 2.4 million into an ever-shrinking space.

Despite what Guterres described as “devastation… upon devastation”, Israeli far-right leaders met in Jerusalem to discuss plans for redeveloping Gaza as a tourist-friendly “riviera”, with a permanent Jewish presence.

A “master plan” presented at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, foresees the construction of housing for 1.2 million new Jewish residents and the development of industrial and agricultural zones, as well as tourism complexes on the coast.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed 59,106 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.