Huda Abu Naja is weak and emaciated on a thin mattress in her family’s tent in a travel camp in Deir El-Balah du Central Gaza.
The arms of the 12 -year -old Palestinian girl are painfully thin, and the bones of her chest exceed under her skin, a revealing sign of her acute malnutrition.
“My daughter has suffered from acute malnutrition since March, when Israel has closed the borders of Gaza,” Huda’s mother Somia Abu Naja told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“She spent three months in hospitals, but her condition has not improved,” said Somia, explaining that she had decided to bring Huda back to the family’s tent after seeing five children die from famine to Nasser hospital in the south of Khan Younis of Gaza.
“She weighed 35 kilos (77 pounds), but now she is 20 (44 pounds),” added Somia.
Huda is only hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children with malnutrition in Gaza, according to local health authorities, while Israel continues to block food and other humanitarian aid by entering the bombed enclave.
On Friday, an hunger instructor supported by the United Nations confirmed for the first time that more than half a million people knew famine in the north of Gaza-the first designation of this type never recorded in the Middle East.
The classification system for the integrated food security phase (IPC) warned that the figure could reach 614,000 because famine should spread to governors Deir El-Balah and Khan Younis by the end of September.
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, more than 280 people, more than 110 children, have died due to the famine induced by Israel since the war of the country against Gaza began almost two years ago.
Children are hard hit by the crisis, the CIP announced on Friday, with around 132,000 children under the age of five, which should be at risk of acute malnutrition by June 2026.
Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, the chief pediatric doctor of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said that 120 children were asking for a treatment for malnutrition in the establishment, while tens of thousands of others suffered in travel camps with little help.
He told Tel Aviv Tribune that the children of Gaza will suffer the consequences of malnutrition for the rest of their lives, because the enclave hospitals lack resources and supplies to respond to the crisis.
Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, also told Tel Aviv Tribune that around 320,000 children in Gaza were in a severe malnutrition.
He said that all patients injured in hospitals also suffered from malnutrition in the middle of the continuous blockade of Israel in the enclave.
Israel rejected the IPC’s conclusions, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying – despite mounds of evidence – that there was “no famine in Gaza”.
Although Israel has granted limited supplies to the territory in recent weeks in the midst of world indignation in the face of the famine crisis, UN and UN groups say what is authorized to remain unfortunately.
A help distribution program supported by Israelis known as GHF was also condemned as ineffective and deadly, Israeli forces and American entrepreneurs killing more than 2,000 Palestinians while they have been looking for food on sites since the end of May.
The classification of the Famine of the IPC has sparked a renewed wave of calls for Israel to urgently allow a massive and supported influx of assistance to Gaza.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Friday that famine was an “artificial disaster, a moral act and a failure of humanity itself”.
The head of aid aid, Tom Fletcher, also said that famine occurred “less than a few hundred meters of food” because the emergency trucks were stuck at the borders due to Israeli restrictions. He demanded that Israel authorize food and drugs on a massive scale required “.