For the children of Gaza, acute malnutrition can cause lifetime from health challenges

When children are deprived of adequate food, you can follow a series of health failure quickly. Critical and death disease may face, and even those who live alive facing healthy challenges.

Young Palestinians, especially those under the age of 5, are especially displayed in the Gaza Strip, as Israel imposed restrictions on entry to aid throughout the war, sometimes closing the crossings. The highest levels of malnutrition have been reported since the war began this summer, and its largest city has been officially announced under starvation by a committee of food security experts.

Sources: Integrated food security classification (IPC); SOP nutrition group

Note: Children were between 6 months and 5 years old and were examined by a group of relief agencies coordinated by UNICEF called the Nutrition Group. IPC analyzed this data. Gaza City data include the surrounding area. More children may experience more malnutrition than they are treated due to limited examination and treatment.

Food and other supplies began to be needed to retreat to Gaza in May after a 11 -week siege imposed by Israel. It was not enough. In July, food consumption scored its lowest point since the war began, according to the classification of integrated food security, a group of unnecessary experts. Monitor global hunger.

More assistance has gone to Gaza since then. But the lack of food is still widespread, and for some of the most vulnerable conquests, the damage may have already occurred.

When children are exposed to extreme malnutrition, their bodies depend on reserves to buy a last battle in order to survive. In the end, their organs begin to collapse.

Sometimes it becomes thin skeleton. At other times, inflation. It can be hidden to the point of movement, and stop eating even if there is food, because eating takes the energy that it does not have. As their defense systems start, they may die suddenly due to common diseases that the most healthier child may bear.

This is what happens to the body malnutrition.

When children suffer from acute malnutrition, most normal foods will not reflect the process.

The World Health Organization recommends feeding children with sharply malnutrition, such as nuts and sweet potatoes, and sometimes it can be found locally.

But it is not always available in Gaza, where markets and farms have been destroyed. Children there need specially made therapeutic food: fertilized milk, very young children, or a peanut -based product packed with calories, vitamins and foodstuffs. The World Health Organization also recommends broad -spectrum antibiotics to treat infections.

The most worse children should be treated seriously in the hospital, partly because they do not have appetite and their bodies are trying to maintain energy. These children are specially designed milk, often through the gastric nose tube.

Sherif Mattar, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital in Rankisi, northern Gaza, said that the doctors were struggling to deal with the shortage of this feded milk. He said in an interview in late August.

“We are trying to do our best with what we can,” said Dr. Mattar. “But with regard to the quality or amount of what is available, it is not enough.”

A child who treats malnutrition at the Ranksi Children’s Hospital.

Saher Alghorra for the New York Times

Throughout the war, Israeli officials reduced the severity of hunger in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office The name The announcement of the last Gaza City starvation is a “frank lie”, and said that the experts behind the famine report have overlooked the Israeli efforts since late July to enter more food into the region.

However, relief officials say these measures lack what is required. During the first two weeks of August, the United Nations said that approximately 6000 children among more than 58,000 were offered to have malnutrition.

Dr. Mattar said that Gaza’s doctors are not used to deal with acute malnutrition, because the pocket has never faced a severe crisis. He said that some doctors in his hospital take lessons in the emergency situations organized by the World Health Organization, while others were trying to read everything they could on how to treat it.

Gaza health officials say dozens of children have died due to malnutrition since June, but they are not clearly suffering from malnutrition and other diseases or conditions in advance. Experts say children with malnutrition can be more likely to develop other diseases, and children with conditions can be more likely to become malnutrition.

Dr. Mattar said that some children who get treatment have recovered, including a 5 -year -old girl who was rescued with therapeutic milk.

For a child, food is not just energy for the day on hand. It is the basic building building block for future life, needed to develop muscles, bones and brain.

A nurse examining a child for malnutrition at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.

Ramadan Abed/Reuters

Even if children with severe malnutrition receive effective treatment and survival, they may suffer from intended growth, soft bones, liver problems, kidney and cognitive issues. In the long run, there may be an increased risk of stroke, diabetes and heart disease.

Gille Suleiman, director of the Children’s Hospital in Rankisi, said that, given the lack of food on a large scale in Gaza, treating one child can sometimes feel the Sezevian. Dr. Suleiman said that some sponsorship was released to the tents camps, where their fathers are still struggling to find enough food.

“Some of the children we launched return with the same problems a week,” he said.