• The UN’s World Food Programme warned in early July that the price of flour for bread was 3,000 times more expensive than before the war began more than 21 months ago

NUSEIRAT: As malnutrition surges in war-torn Gaza, tens of thousands of children and women require urgent treatment, according to the UN, while aid enters the blockaded Palestinian territory at a trickle.

Gaza’s civil defense agency said it has noted a rising number of infant deaths caused by “severe hunger and malnutrition,” reporting at least three such deaths in the past week.

“These heartbreaking cases were not caused by direct bombing but by starvation, the lack of baby formula and the absence of basic health care,” civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.

Ziad Musleh, a 45-year-old father displaced from Gaza’s north to the central city of Nuseirat, said: “We are dying, our children are dying and we can’t do anything to stop it.”

“Our children cry and scream for food. They go to sleep in pain, in hunger, with empty stomachs. There is absolutely no food.

“And if by chance a small amount appears in the market, the prices are outrageous — no one can afford it.”

At a food distribution site in a UN-school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat on Sunday, children entertained themselves by banging on their plates as they waited for their turn.

Several of them had faces stretched thin by hunger, a journalist reported.

Umm Sameh Abu Zeina, whose cheekbones protruded from her thin face as she waited for food in Nuseirat, said she had lost 35 kg.

“We do not eat enough. I don’t eat, I leave the food I receive for my daughter,” she said, adding that she had a range of health conditions, including high blood pressure and diabetes.

Gazans as well as the UN and aid organizations frequently complain that depleted stocks have sent prices skyrocketing for what little food is available in the markets.

The UN’s World Food Programme warned in early July that the price of flour for bread was 3,000 times more expensive than before the war began more than 21 months ago.

WFP director Carl Skau, who visited Gaza City in early July, described the situation as “the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“A father I met had lost 25 kg in the past two months. People are starving, while we have food just across the border,” he said. “Our kitchens are empty; they are now serving hot water with a bit of pasta floating in it,” said Skau.

The effects of malnutrition on children and pregnant women can be particularly dire.

AFP