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Photos: Published by 972Mag
Twelve-year-old Rahaf Ayad holds a phone showing a picture of herself before the war, in her family's home in Gaza City, May 2, 2025. (Ahmed Ahmed) Published by 972Mag

Rahaf Ayad with her parents in their home in Gaza City, May 2, 2025. (Ahmed Ahmed) Published by 972Mag

Displaced Palestinians line up to receive a meal in the northern Gaza Strip, May 5, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90) Published by 972Mag

Ibrahim Badawi and his children, in the family’s tent in Gaza City, May 4, 2025. (Ahmed Ahmed) Published by 972Mag

Palestinians, holding pan including children, create a stampede to get hot meals, distributed by charitable organizations to displaced Palestinians amid Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis, Gaza on May 6, 2025.Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib / Anadolu via Reuters Connect. Published by Haaretz
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With over 70,000 children hospitalized for malnutrition, Israel's blockade on the Strip has left parents to watch helplessly as their children waste away.

By Ahmed Ahmed and Ruwaida Amer for 972Mag
May 8, 2025

Twelve-year-old Rahaf Ayad is so malnourished she can barely speak. Her hair is falling out. Her ribs protrude. She can hardly move her limbs. She blinks slowly, her eyelids heavy.

Originally from Al-Shuja’iya in eastern Gaza City, Rahaf now lives with her seven family members in a single room in a relative’s house in the city’s Al-Rimal neighborhood.

Shurooq, Rahaf’s mother, explained that her daughter’s health began deteriorating rapidly due to the lack of food. “If anyone touches her, or she tries to move her arms or legs, she just cries out in pain,” she told +972. “She says it feels like her body is burning from the inside. She asks for chicken, meat, or eggs — but there’s nothing in the markets.”


Shurooq and her 45-year-old husband, Rani, have gone from clinic to clinic in search of treatment, supplements, or even advice, but Gaza’s devastated healthcare system offered little help. “Doctors told us there are hundreds of children like Rahaf, and the only thing that can save them is proper food,” she said. “I bought her vitamins from a pharmacy, but when I returned to buy more a week later, they ran out.”

Rahaf’s siblings help with her care: feeding her, bathing her, taking her to the bathroom, and changing her clothes. When food is available, the family puts her needs first. “We eat only after she’s eaten,” said Shurooq. “When we have money, we buy whatever [food] she asks for. But now, there’s nothing — and when we do find something, we can’t afford it.”

Even when Shurooq manages to find and prepare some of the few staples still available in Gaza, like rice, lentils, or pasta, Rahaf cries for chicken, meat or eggs — anything with the protein her body so desperately needs. Eventually, hunger wins out and she eats whatever is available.

“I tell her the border will open soon, and I’ll bring her whatever she wants,” Shurooq said, holding back tears. “Rahaf’s health is collapsing every day. She’s dying in front of my eyes, and we can’t do anything.”

Rahaf loves the English language. She once dreamed of studying English in university and becoming a teacher. But her life — like those of hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza — has been shattered beyond recognition by Israel’s ongoing war.

“I wish my hair would come back,” Rahaf whispered. “I want to walk and play with my siblings like I used to.”

The silent killer
For a little over two months, Israel has prevented all food, goods, and medical supplies from entering the Gaza Strip. The consequences have been catastrophic: According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, over 70,000 children are now hospitalized with acute malnutrition, and 1.1 million lack the daily minimum nutritional requirements for survival.

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported that, as of May 5, at least 57 children have already died from malnutrition-related health complications since the start of the war, and another 3,500 under the age of five face imminent risk of death from starvation.

“Over the past two weeks, the famine intensified significantly,” Dr. Ahmed Al Faraa, director of the maternity and pediatrics department at Nasser Hospital, told +972. “In that period, we have treated approximately 10 children suffering from very serious malnutrition.”

Dr. Ahed Khalaf, a pediatric specialist at Nasser Hospital, told Al Jazeera recently that they have never seen such severe cases of malnutrition in children. “They are suffering from blood poisoning, organ failure, liver and kidney damage, bacterial and microbial infections, and weakened immunity.”

Shortly after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on April 16 that “no one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza,” local and international food distributors, once a lifeline for hundreds of thousands, started shutting down one by one. On April 25, the World Food Program announced it had run out of its remaining food stocks. On May 7, World Central Kitchen announced that it “no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza.”

“The siege on Gaza is the silent killer of children [and] older people,” UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said in a press briefing on April 29. “We have just over 5,000 trucks with lifesaving supplies that are ready to come in. This decision [not to let them in] is threatening the lives and survival of civilians in Gaza, who are also going through heavy bombardment day in, day out.”

‘Everyone I know is broke’
Ibrahim Badawi, 38, needs at least four kilos of flour a day to feed his family of nine. These days, he struggles to find even one kilo. “I feel helpless when my children ask for bread and I have nothing to give them,” he told +972. “Sometimes, I wish my children and I would die in an airstrike together — to be spared the pain of starvation and this continuous agony.”

Badawi, who was displaced from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, is living in a makeshift shelter of tarps and blankets on the shore of Gaza City. Since Israel shattered the ceasefire in March, Badawi has not received a single food parcel.

Badawi and his wife, along with their eldest son Mustafa, 15, have grown accustomed to going to bed hungry so the younger children can eat the small portions of rice or lentils they occasionally receive from the community kitchen. “My youngest, Abdullah, who is four years old, cries from hunger, saying his stomach hurts. I lie and tell him I’ll bring flour soon just so he can sleep,” Badawi lamented.

But even if flour were available, Badawi couldn’t afford it. Until late March, most Gazans survived on stockpiled bread and canned goods as prices soared. But then, the crisis deepened: when all 26 World Food Program bakeries closed due to flour and fuel shortages, white flour became impossibly expensive. A 25 kilogram sack of white flour which cost NIS 30 ($8.30) before the war, now costs a staggering NIS 1,500 ($416).

“I’ve borrowed money from neighbors and friends many times to buy flour,” Badawi said. “But now everyone I know is broke. My children suffer from colic and indigestion. If this famine continues, we will all die from starvation.”

‘Neither Israel, Hamas, nor the world cares about us’
Hadia Radi, a 42-year-old mother of six, lives with her family in a makeshift tent on Gaza City’s Al-Wihda Street. Like countless other families in the enclave, they’ve been dealing with both hunger and bombardment for months. On April 15, an Israeli airstrike hit just meters from their tent, injuring several family members, including Hadia’s 7-year-old son Yamen, whose leg was broken when it was hit by shrapnel.

Now being treated at the Red Crescent’s Al-Saraya field hospital, Yamen’s recovery is complicated by severe malnutrition. “He’s lost 10 kilos in two months,” Radi told +972. “We’ve eaten nothing but rice since the blockade began. Without proper nutrition, our wounds won’t heal.”

Food is now so scarce that even small acts of kindness can be risky. Recently, a neighbor heard Yamen crying on the phone from his hospital tent, begging his mother for bread. The next morning, he brought the family ten pieces of bread, smuggled in a black bag to avoid attracting hungry eyes. Radi hid the bread in their tent like treasure. “Every day, I’d send one piece with my husband for Yamen. His siblings cried for some too, but I told them that the most injured must come first.”

Yamen keeps asking for his mother to visit, but Radi remains trapped by her own injuries from the blast — a broken leg that leaves her dependent on crutches. She’s equally powerless to reach her 13-year-old daughter Hannan, who is being treated at Al-Shifa Hospital’s overwhelmed wards.

Hannan was hit by shrapnel that took one of her eyes and left her unable to walk. The lack of food has made recovery extremely difficult. “She needs vegetables, healthy food, and special care to heal,” Radi explained. “But there’s no access to any of that here.”

Radi believes Israel is starving Gaza to pressure Hamas, but says it’s regular families paying the price. “We’re watching our children wither away, and neither Israel, Hamas, nor the world cares,” she lamented. “Why should my kids starve to death? What did we do to deserve this? If you can’t stop the war, at least open the borders. Don’t let us die from starvation.”

‘Netanyahu punishes us just for existing’
Heba Malahi, 41, has also lived in a makeshift tent on Gaza City’s Al-Wihda Street since an Israeli airstrike destroyed her home in Juhor ad-Dik in 2023. Now she and her 45-year-old husband Ribhi regularly skip meals so their seven children can eat.

Mahmoud, the couple’s six-year-old son, suffers from severe malnutrition. “He’s tired all the time. He doesn’t eat, his bones hurt, and his teeth are starting to fall out,” Heba told +972. “Last week he begged for tomatoes. We sold our last canned food just to buy a single kilo — we all shared that one meal.”

Their 17-year-old daughter Ruba desperately craves simple foods like potatoes, but at NIS 60 per kilo, they’re virtually unattainable. “Netanyahu punishes us just for existing,” Heba said. “Maybe someone like Trump could force him to open the borders before we all starve.

“If people imagined their own children in this state, perhaps they’d act,” she added.

Further south, In Khan Younis, Mona Al-Raqab has been sitting with her five-year-old son Osama for over a week in the Nasser Medical Complex. He currently weighs just nine kilograms (20 pounds). Displaced multiple times since the war began with little food or clean water, his digestive system has almost failed. “Doctors try feeding him nutrients,” Al-Raqab said, “but a growing child needs real food of different types.”
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'Gaza Is Unlivable': One Palestinian Man's Struggle to Feed His Family as Prices Soar

A Gaza resident tells Haaretz about how his family is coping with the lack of food in the Strip: 'We agreed: one meal a day, no bread. We rely on water trucks for drinking water'

by Nir Hasson for Haaretz
May 7, 2025

Friday marked two months since Israel fully closed the border crossings into the Gaza Strip, preventing any food or aid from entering the enclave. Food supplies in Gaza have grown meager, prices have soared and reports of starvation and diseases connected to malnourishment have intensified.

"Our diet is down to the bare minimum," Ahmed (an alias) tells Haaretz. "We mostly eat lentils and other legumes, whatever is still available. We've reduced ourselves to one meal daily because we're almost out of flour. As a family, we agreed: one meal a day, no bread. If we find pasta, we try to stockpile it. Like everyone else, we rely on water trucks for drinking water. Every day we line up, hoping to fill a container. Some days, we don't make it; either the truck doesn't come or the line is too long. On those days, we drink untreated water.

"We go to the market nearly every day, just hoping to find something we can afford. A few vegetables are available, but they're extremely expensive, grown in home gardens and sold for barter so families can get other essentials. We buy one onion at a time, trying to make it last across several meals just for a bit of flavor.

"Cooking is done over open fires using wood and melted plastic. We buy the plastic by the kilo from people who collect old barrels, cut them into pieces and sell them as fuel. This is what we breathe in daily while preparing food. Many families can't even afford that. They survive on aid handouts, which are often low-quality and nutritionally poor."

'The most painful part? None of this affects Hamas. Nothing we're going through seems to influence the hostage negotiations or anything else.'

On Tuesday the price of flour reached 45 shekels per kilogram (around $5.60 per pound), "and most people can't even afford one kilo," Ahmed says. Pasta is cheaper at 22 shekels per kilogram, and he says that "my aunt recommended buying pasta and grinding it to make bread. She told us she tried it and it works well. For now, we still have a little flour at home that we had bought when the end of the cease-fire was announced. Maybe by the beginning of next week, we'll start eating pasta instead."

The financial system in Gaza has already collapsed due to shortage of cash and the deterioration of existing banknotes, as well as the nearly 100 percent unemployment. Ahmed says that his family recently tried to withdraw some cash from the bank: "We had to pay the money changer 500 shekels just to withdraw 1,000 shekels – a 33 percent fee! That was actually the lowest fee we found that day."

In addition to the difficulty in getting food and water, Gazans have also been suffering from severe sanitation problems. "Sewage runs through the streets and into the shelters like rivers. You can't walk anywhere without stepping in it. Mosquitoes and rats are everywhere. With our immune systems so weak, even a small insect bite can turn into a serious infection," says Ahmed.

"For over a month now I've been going to sleep hungry every single night. Wherever you go, you hear people talking about bread and their nostalgia for the days when everything was available," he adds.

"Weight loss has become common. I've lost a lot of weight this past month. One meal a day doesn't give me the energy I need to get through the day. By the time I get home at the end of the day, I'm very hungry, but I hesitate to open the refrigerator because I know it's empty, or if there's anything inside, I feel ashamed to eat it.

"The most painful part? None of this affects Hamas. Nothing we're going through seems to influence the hostage negotiations or anything else. Everyone knows this. That's why morale is so low. People have come to believe that the Israeli military isn't targeting Hamas – it's targeting us, the civilians. If the goal were truly to dismantle Hamas, other strategies could be used, ones that don't involve starving, killing, or displacing an entire population."

"Life here has lost all meaning," says Ahmed. "I don't believe Gaza has a future anymore. The city is gone. Even if the war ended today, and I don't think that's likely, it wouldn't change much. Gaza is unlivable.

"We are hostages too. Not only to the war, but to those in power here. We are hostages to Hamas. They won't hear us. They won't care for us. Our pain doesn't reach them, and our survival doesn't concern them. We can't escape the war. We can't shield ourselves from it.

"The difference between us and the hostages is that they have people speaking on their behalf, people who care, who fight for them. We have no one. To the international community, we're all seen as terrorists. They don't even bother to listen to the people of Gaza."

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