UN report: The bodies of Gaza’s children are collapsing due to starvation and blockade By Marwan Sultan. Palestine.
By Marwan Sultan. Palestine. 14.7.2025 Translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Ebeid
UN report: The bodies of Gaza’s children are collapsing due to starvation and blockade
By Marwan Sultan. Palestine.
14.7.2025
Translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Ebeid.
In an earlier statement, UNICEF spokeswoman Tess Ingram said that the “shattered bodies and shattered lives” of Gaza’s children are a testament to the brutality imposed on them. She stressed that with a child killed or injured every ten minutes, the only way to stop the killing and maiming of children is a ceasefire.
It is not strange that the occupation targets the children of Palestine, because children are the future of people, and the children of Palestine are the ones who have been inspired by the help of Palestinian life. Their dreams, memories, and breath have been shaped by the narrative of parents and grandparents. They carry the worries of the present with its cruelty, a reality dipped in blood, hunger, thirst, disease, displacement, living without housing, without education, full of loss, and the brutality of humanity. However, the hope of tomorrow remains a more beautiful day, the hope of freedom, and the hope of childhood filled with joy and love, like all the children of the world.
Almost two years into the war, Gaza’s children have tasted both. What kind of war is it in which a child in Gaza rises every ten minutes, because of indiscriminate shelling and targeting of civilians? Destinies wanted them to be witnesses to martyrdom, and the occupation forced them to be, along with their families, fuel for its fire and its brutal policy. It is as if the mouthpiece of the verse says: ”And if the woman was asked ۞ by what sin she was killed”
These children, who were not killed in warfare, died of starvation, thirst, or disease. It is the deadly blockade imposed by the occupation on Gaza since the war that followed the seventh of October.
UNICEF announced that in June, about 5,800 children had been diagnosed with malnutrition. She explained that the bodies of Gaza’s children are collapsing and withering, and that malnutrition rates are on the rise. So, how not to emaciate those slender bodies? And how not to get sick and die? They are weak and exhausted bodies. Their bodies were exhausted by displacement, their feet exhausted by fear, and their lives exhausted by the blockade.
You see, what is going on in the minds of these children who were destined to be fuel for death in a war they were forced to taste? This is a soul-shattering question.
Are they afraid of death?
Of course, no one likes death.
Are they afraid to lose a mother, father, brother, sister, or dear relative?
Yes, they are afraid.
Are they afraid to lose some of their organs, whether it is a hand, a foot, or a deep wound?
Yes, they are afraid.
I heard a child say, “I get up at night to check on my mother, father, and brothers,” and she says, “I’m scared.”
How do we measure this fear? By what measure is it calculated? How are its results, effects, and treatment measured?.
How is starvation measured, just as we do not know how love, courage, masculinity, or feet are measured?
They are metaphysical measures, which we can describe, but whose extent is known only to God.
Every day, dozens of martyrs, more than a hundred, are killed, most of them children. More than eighteen thousand children have been killed since the outbreak of the war, and some seventy children have starved to death due to the blockade of Gaza. A blockade imposed not only by the Israeli military machine, but also by major powers that claim to defend human rights and practice double standards in their ugliest form. In Gaza, the price of a loaf of bread is blood, and the cost of survival is humiliation and betrayal. The children of Gaza are no longer just numbers, but the title of a declared condemnation of an international system that has lost its humanity and has become an accomplice to crime through silence and complicity
