A displaced Palestinian child sits next to a pot of lentil soup that he received at a food distribution point in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on July 25, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
Geneva: The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Friday that a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished, blaming Israel's "policy of starvation".
The aid group, known by its French initials MSF, said the "Israeli authorities' deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive".
It said its staff in the besieged and war-torn Palestinian territory were receiving growing numbers of malnourished patients.
"Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent were malnourished," it said.
At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, it said the number of people needing care for malnutrition had quadrupled since mid-May, while "rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone".
"This is not just hunger," the organisation said. "It's deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities."
MSF spokeswoman Yvonne Eckert told AFP that the charity's staff in Gaza had last week enrolled "around 600 children under five to the ATFC (Ambulatory Therapeutic Feeding Centre) programmes as new admissions for malnutrition".
