I saw starving children every day in Gaza. It makes you question humanity

When you hold a starving baby in your hands, you feel how fragile life is.

I saw starving children every day in Gaza, either in the medical facilities or in the streets with their mothers, begging for food. The toddlers look like babies, and older children are the size of toddlers. If they have enough energy to move, they’re not playing because they’re so traumatised by the bombing, and they’re just looking for water or scraps of food. The mothers keep going because they have to survive – they can’t let their children die; they’re distraught by the state their children are in.

Palestinian child Yazan Abu Foul, 2, who is suffering from severe malnutrition, is held by his mother, Naima.Credit: EPA

But they’re all wasting away, and they don’t have to. There are hundreds of trucks at the border with all the food that is needed, all the infant formula, all the medical supplies. They’ve been there for months with everything that’s needed for the people of Gaza, especially for the infants, to survive. It makes you question humanity and really wonder: What has gone wrong with the world, that we’re still in this situation where there is so much hatred against people who are defenceless?

The longer-term medical effects of being deprived of food include stunting and wasting. The children will not reach their potential in life if they’re severely malnourished as infants. They won’t develop properly, physically and physiologically, and it can affect mental development, being deprived of all the nutrients that they need. These children don’t have the start in life that they should, and this will affect the whole population.

We haven’t received any medical supplies since March 2, apart from nine trucks that were allowed in by the Israeli authorities. But then they made the trucks come on roads that were very unsafe, in the middle of the night, and eventually they were attacked. And this makes it impossible to continue bringing in medical supplies.

I’ve worked in conflict zones for 20 years. And although the people of Gaza are some of the bravest and most determined that I’ve ever met, they are also a defenceless population: children, infants, women, the disabled, the elderly, all the vulnerable and young adults who are missing their limbs. They’re having to run and hide, and they’re being bombed and starved. It could be stopped by the world, but nothing’s being done about it.

Australian medic Claire Manera (inset) has been working with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Gaza.Credit:

The people of Gaza have been through hell, not just for the past two years but for decades. So they can tell when you’re giving false hope; if a child is not going to survive, then we must be honest. I remember standing by while a five-year-old girl had her dressings changed on third-degree burns, without enough pain medication. She was screaming in agony, and all her parents could do was stand by and watch. And even then, we had to tell the parents that we did not know if the girl would survive – especially without adequate nutrition to heal and recover.

At Nasser Hospital I would see emaciated babies in the neonatal ICU and a paediatric ICU. But while I was there, the Israeli forces attacked the hospital twice – they’d send rockets through the windows of the hospital to target certain individuals who they wanted dead. One of them was said to be an extremely brave journalist who was a patient in the hospital at the time.

But when Nasser Hospital started being surrounded by the Israeli forces, we had to move our burns unit, operating theatres, various departments, physiotherapy and mental health services into a field hospital. But MSF couldn’t move the children and babies from the ICU because you can’t provide intensive care in a field hospital. It felt like we were leaving these babies behind.

But apart from attacking the hospitals, the Israeli forces make it impossible for us to work there. They give displacement orders to the population with warnings and say, “All of this area has to get out of their homes because we’re going to bomb and destroy everything within those boundaries”; it’s called a red zone. So it means you can’t go there because it’s now designated as an area that will be under attack until further notice. One of these warnings was put all around the hospital.

Dr Marwan al-Hams surveys the destruction inside the surgical building of Nasser Hospital in March, a day after it was struck by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, in March.Credit: AP

The Israeli authorities would tell MSF that we could go through the red zones but we had to co-ordinate with them. So we would have to tell them exactly what time we were going, and then they would tell us which road we could go on, and we’d have to wait at a checkpoint to get into the hospital, and they would make us wait for hours and hours in the middle of very busy areas where it wasn’t safe. We could hear the bombing around us. They would do this every day. That meant our staff doing 24-hour shifts would have to stay on and do 48 hours or 72 hours because we just couldn’t get in and out properly.

Sometimes there are no warnings given at all before the bombing starts. A bomb was dropped without warning in front of the MSF clinic in Gaza City. By some miracle, none of our staff were killed. Instead, the staff rushed out to the street to save the lives that they could, without even knowing if the bombing had stopped. They saved 28 lives that day.

More than 85 per cent of Gaza is now a red zone, so the population is being forced into a small area that the Israeli authorities call a “concentration zone”. I’m worried because I don’t know what’s going to happen when they have everyone in that area. It’s scary to think what they’re planning once they have people in there. It could be a way to get rid of the whole population.

What I witnessed on the ground is that every time there was talk of a ceasefire, that is when the bombings would increase and the treatment of the civilians would get worse. As soon as there could be a glimmer of hope and a diplomatic solution, more people would start to die in more ways. There’d be more bombings. There’d be tanks coming in faster and faster, destroying buildings. And the shootings, at the distribution sites as well, increase. So we were also receiving cases of people at these distribution sites that are run by the Israeli authorities, people who are shot in the head and in the chest.

You start to lose hope eventually when you can see that the world is not responding, and especially our own government. To go back and do work is easier if you know that the world is behind you and that they’re going to look at a longer solution, but otherwise it’s really heartbreaking. To keep doing that long-term is what breaks your spirit eventually. And this is what is breaking the spirit of our Palestinian staff in Gaza: you can see them becoming more and more depressed, day by day, because they know that the world is not doing anything to help them. Collectively, it’s really hard to keep going.

I’m going back in the coming months and I don’t know how I will be able to do my job and help the people of Gaza. The situation is becoming more and more unsafe.

If people are appalled by these recent photos of starving children and they make their voices heard, they can make a difference and the politicians will have to act. The decision to do something is in the hands of the powers that control the weapons and the money behind it. It is urgent that we speak up now and do everything we can to prevent further deaths of innocent people.

Claire Manera is a Medecins Sans Frontieres Australian emergency co-ordinator. She has worked in conflict zones for the past 20 years, most recently in Gaza.

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