Starvation as a Weapon: Gaza's Children and Mothers Face Death While the World Watches

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Gaza is starving — and the silence from the world’s most powerful nations is deafening. The numbers are no longer just statistics. They are the hollowed cheeks of children, the sunken eyes of mothers, and the faint, shivering bodies of healthcare workers now forced to choose between saving lives or fighting to survive themselves.

Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières / MSF) has raised a harrowing alarm: one in four children under five and pregnant or breastfeeding women in Gaza are now malnourished. At MSF’s Gaza City clinic alone, the number of those treated for malnutrition has quadrupled since mid-May. In just the last two weeks, rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled.

This is not the result of natural famine or logistical error. This is the calculated weaponization of hunger.

“This is not just hunger – it’s deliberate starvation,” says Caroline Willemen, MSF project coordinator in Gaza City. “We are enrolling 25 new patients every single day for malnutrition. We see the exhaustion and the hunger in our own colleagues.”

A War on the Most Vulnerable

In a clinic overwhelmed with starving patients, Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF’s deputy medical coordinator, not only treats the malnourished — he feels it in his own weakening body. Doctors, nurses, and aid workers are skipping meals, surviving on scraps, while they treat victims who are far worse off. Infants cry not from pain but from emptiness. Mothers faint mid-sentence. And children, some barely able to walk, are fading before they can speak.

Despite these atrocities, the international response has been meager — symbolic airdrops of food that fall tragically short of the actual need. Even these attempts are met with bloodshed.

The Israeli military has turned food lines into death traps. Distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — an Israeli-sanctioned and US-backed proxy — have become hunting grounds. People lining up for aid risk not just going home empty-handed but never going home at all.

“These are not humanitarian operations. They are war crimes disguised with compassion,” Dr. Mughaisib says. “Those who go to GHF’s food distributions know they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head.”

Flour for Bullets

The recent massacre at Sheikh Radwan clinic paints the grisliest picture yet. As desperate civilians approached trucks carrying flour, Israeli forces opened fire. MSF and Ministry of Health teams treated 122 people with gunshot wounds that day. Forty-six were dead on arrival.

Let that sink in: they died waiting for flour.

“This is genocide unfolding before our eyes,” says Amande Bazerolle, MSF’s head of emergency response. “Any shred of humanity in Doctors Without Borders has been wiped out in the ongoing slaughter.”

Over 1,000 civilians have been killed and more than 7,200 injured in the past two months, many of them during attempts to access food and aid. The targets include women, children, the elderly — none are spared.

Rice Once a Day, If You're Lucky

The starvation is systemic. Community kitchens, once a vital lifeline for hospitals and clinics, have shut down or now manage to serve one meal of plain rice per day — hardly enough for patients recovering from injury or infection. Medical staff, too, often go without.

This is no longer about financial hardship or conflict-disrupted supply chains. It’s about the deliberate restriction and denial of food, used as a tool of war against an entire civilian population.

Gaza’s food supply has been reduced to near extinction, leaving nearly 2 million people in survival mode. MSF’s frontline health workers — some of the last remaining symbols of hope — are exhausted, starved, and increasingly broken.

This Must End — Now

The forced starvation of Gaza is a war crime. There is no gray area. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of starvation as a method of warfare. The international community, especially those funding and arming Israel, must be held accountable.

To allow this to continue is to be complicit.

Airdrops of rice and flour are not a solution. They are a distraction. Gaza needs unrestricted humanitarian access, a ceasefire, and a full restoration of life-saving aid — not symbolic gestures amid genocide.

If food is life, then starvation is murder. And in Gaza, that murder is happening in broad daylight.

Ross Flores Del Rosario, founder of Wazzup Pilipinas, calls on every journalist, every global citizen, and every leader of conscience: Do not look away. Do not accept starvation as strategy. Demand an end to this inhumanity.

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