Woman from Gaza evacuated to Italy dies in hospital
She was removed from Gaza as part of a humanitarian mission and arrived with a 'with a very complex, compromised clinical picture', according to the hospital.
She died after entering a respiratory crisis and subsequently going into cardiac arrest, it said in a statement.
Hospital staff had performed tests and started supportive therapy before she died, the statement said.
The woman, named by Italian media as Marah Abu Zuhri, had arrived in Italy with her mother.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said almost 120 Palestinians – 31 patients and their families – had been flown to Rome, Milan and Pisa on three planes.
In a post on X, Mr Tajani said that it was the 14th medical evacuation of Palestinians that Italy had conducted since January 2024, and the largest.
The hospital did not specify whether the woman had suffered from malnutrition, but said that she had arrived in a 'state of severe physical deterioration.'
Eugenio Giani, leader of the Tuscan region, expressed his condolences on Saturday for the woman's death.
Earlier in the week, United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that starvation and malnutrition in Gaza were at their highest levels since the Israel-Hamas war began.
The UN says nearly 12,000 children under five were found to have acute malnutrition in July – including more than 2,500 with severe malnutrition, the most dangerous level. The World Health Organisation says the numbers are likely an undercount.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month no one in Gaza is starving.
'There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,' he said.
US President Donald Trump responded to Mr Netanyahu's claim by noting the images emerging of emaciated people.
'I don't know,' Mr Trump said when asked if he agreed with the Israeli leader's comment. 'I mean, based on television, I would say not particularly because those children look very hungry.'
On Saturday, the US State Department said all visitor visas for people from Gaza are being stopped while a review is carried out of how 'a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas' were issued in recent days.
Over the past two weeks, Israel has allowed around triple the amount of food into Gaza than what had been entering since late May.
That was after two and a half months when Israel barred all food, medicine and other supplies, saying it was to pressure Hamas to release hostages taken during its October 2023 attack that launched the war.
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The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
At least 17 aid seekers killed as Israel escalates attack on last major population centre in Gaza City
The Israeli military escalated its attack on the last major population centre in Gaza City, forcing starving Palestinian refugees to flee once again. At least seven people were killed after an Israeli airstrike targeted Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported, while thousands of families fled Zeitoun along with the neighbouring areas of Sabra, Remal and Tuffah. 'The Zeitoun neighbourhood is a very densely populated area, home to many families, including those who have been sheltering there,' Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary reported. 'Residents were surprised when the artillery shelling and the intensive air raids started. Some people stayed. Others started moving. As the violence escalated, many were forced to evacuate – hungry, devastated and displaced yet again, leaving behind everything they had.' Medics and witnesses said Israeli forces killed at least 17 aid seekers on Sunday, including nine awaiting UN aid trucks close to the Morag corridor. Hamza Asfour said he was just north of the corridor awaiting a convoy when Israeli snipers fired. He saw two people with gunshot wounds. 'It's either to take this risk or wait and see my family die of starvation," he said. An Israeli strike in the Bureij camp in central Gaza, meanwhile, killed three people, according to Al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which runs the distribution points that have become the primary source of aid since they opened in May, said there was no gunfire 'at or near' its sites, located in areas controlled by the Israeli military. The GHF was installed in Gaza by Israel and the US to distribute aid in place of reputable humanitarian and UN organisations. At least two more children and five adults died of causes related to malnutrition on Sunday, the health ministry said. Israel's war on Gaza has killed more than 61,900 people so far, turned the besieged Palestinian territory into a wasteland, displaced most of its 2.2 million people and left them starving, according to local health officials and international aid groups. The UN has warned that levels of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at their highest since the war began in October 2023. Israel has blocked most aid from entering Gaza since it enforced a total blockade in March after ending a ceasefire with Hamas. Aid organisations say the partial resumption of deliveries is below what is needed. One in five children in Gaza is malnourished, according to the UN, while tens of thousands rely on food from charity kitchens that can provide only one meal a day. 'I came at 6am to the charity kitchen to get food for my children, and if I don't get any now, I have to come back in the evening for another chance,' Zeinab Nabahan, displaced from the Jabalia refugee camp, told Al Jazeera. 'My children are starving on small amounts of lentils or rice. My children haven't had bread or any breakfast.' Earlier, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned against 'manmade famine' in Gaza. 'We're very, very close to losing our collective humanity,' Juliette Touma, the communication director of the agency, posted on X. The Israeli military chief is finalising a Gaza assault plan and is set to present it to the government, Haaretz reported. It includes preparation to capture Gaza City. The military body that coordinates its aid to Gaza, Cogat, this weekend noted plans to forcibly remove people from combat zones to southern Gaza. Designated "safe zones", however, have also been bombed by Israeli forces during the war. Palestinians insist they won't leave, arguing that there is no safe place in Gaza. "There are no humanitarian zones at all," Raghda Abu Dhaher said. She has been displaced 10 times during the war, she said, and now sheltered in a school in western Gaza City. Mohamed Ahmed also insisted he wouldn't move south. "Here is bombing and there is bombing," he said.
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
Hundreds of thousands of children ‘facing starvation' as last Nigeria aid points set to close
Hundreds of thousands of children will be at risk of dying from starvation in northeast Nigeria after a network of nutrition clinics closes next month, the UN has warned. The World Food Programme (WFP) has already had to close half of its 300 nutrition centres in the conflict-racked region because of a major funding shortfall, and it will have to close the remaining 150 in September, when the last of its budget is set to run out. The Rome-based agency has said it is facing a 40 per cent slump in donations in 2025 compared to last year, largely as a result of sweeping US aid cuts. The shortfall threatens its feeding programmes in 28 crisis zones around the world, from Gaza and Sudan to Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While the WFP has been scrambling to find new donors and reorganising budgets to keep its nutrition clinics open as long as possible, it simply doesn't have the resources to keep them all open. The WFP told The Telegraph that at least 630,000 children are at risk of acute malnutrition in northeast Nigeria, with 280,000 more suffering from wasting, the most lethal form of the condition. If left untreated, it can cause death in weeks. If we stop now, we are literally allowing a death sentence for these children,' said Dr John Ala, WFP's head of nutrition in Maiduguri, capital of Borno state. He added that it was probable that the worst-affected children were already succumbing to hunger. 'Who knows how many have died because they could not access treatment,' he said. 'The malnourished children are there but we are not reaching them.' The WFP's network of nutrition clinics – often little more than small wards inside health facilities where babies, children and sometimes their mothers are assessed for signs of malnourishment before being stabilised and treated with therapeutic foods – covers three states in Nigeria's northeast: Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. The Islamist group Boko Haram, which gained global notoriety for the high-profile kidnappings of hundreds of schoolgirls, has destabilised all three states, adding to underlying issues like deep-rooted poverty which are driving a hunger crisis. The high rates of internal displacement and grinding poverty means that, though there is food available, few can afford to buy enough of it, and often have to rely on one inadequate meal a day. At a clinic in central Maiduguri, Maryam Ibrahim, a 25-year-old mother of two, cradles her severely malnourished eight-month-old daughter Amina in her lap. Ms Ibrahim brought Amina to the stabilisation centre when her stomach began to swell with oedema, a symptom of malnutrition caused by a lack of protein that leads to fluid retention. 'If this clinic shuts down, a lot of people will lose hope because the access and care we have here has been saving a lot of children,' she said, adding that her family can only afford to eat one meal a day of tuwo, a thick, starchy porridge made from ground up grains that's meant to be eaten with a soup. As a malnourished child's symptoms deteriorate, the window for treatment shrinks. 'Most of the children who die present late,' said Dr Ala, adding that many arrive at the clinics unconscious, and lacking even the energy to keep their vital organs functioning. This severely weakened state can also lead to respiratory distress, diarrhoea and vomiting, which take a further toll on the body. It's a painful and drawn out process that – if help is not reached in time – ends with the body shutting down completely. Children that survive often continue to feel the effects of starvation for the rest of their lives. Research suggests that without a sufficient energy supply in the first 1,000 days of life, the growth of a child can be impaired, causing irreversible physical and cognitive damage known as stunting. A few beds down, Bintu Modu, 30, said she rushed her son to the facility when he was no longer able to consume food and started to lose weight rapidly. Local traditional healers said Baba, two-years-old, was 'being attacked spiritually' when he first began to suffer with a fever and watery diarrhoea, she said. 'I was very scared that my child might die,' said Ms Modu, adding that she became so desperate to see her son recover that she was prepared to try the 'herbal remedies' of the healers – often a concoction of leaves that can be a danger in itself. 'It is sad for me to see him in this condition,' she said. 'He used to be active and would often jump up to welcome me … now, he cannot even stand up on his feet.' Dr Ala described the situation in north east Nigeria as a 'nine out of ten' catastrophe, calling it a 'multi-dimensional crisis' that had dealt 'back-to-back' blows to the region. Insecurity has uprooted over 3.9 million people across the north east over the last decade, with many still living in informal settlements without access to farms or jobs. The region was then hit by the worst floods in a decade last September, when a dam just over 10 miles south of Maiduguri collapsed in the middle of the night, killing at least 1,000 people and making thousands more homeless. Dr Ayoade Alakija, World Health Organization (WHO) special envoy and Nigeria's former Chief Humanitarian Coordinator, said: 'This is not a new problem, this is today's iteration.' At the heart of the crisis is a persistent economic and social divide between Nigeria's north and south. The split dates back more than a century, when British colonisers fused the predominantly Muslim north with the Christian south, two regions with deeply-rooted and contrasting religious and ethnic identities. The north, home to 65 per cent of Nigeria's poorest people, persistently ranks lower than the south on nearly all social indicators, including poverty, illiteracy and school enrolment. With polygamy and child marriage commonplace, and fertility rates often exceeding an average of seven children per woman, already limited health, education and social services are stretched thin, trapping communities in cycles of underdevelopment. The north west has its own hunger crisis. Like in the north east, it is linked to insecurity, in this case banditry and clashes over land rights between farmers and nomadic herders. Last month, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that the number of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Katsina state, the epicentre of the crisis, had surged by 208 per cent compared to the same period last year. Between January and June 2025, 652 children in Katsina died of malnutrition after funding cuts disrupted access to treatment, it added. These crises have been playing out in a country which is one of Africa's richest. Despite its vast oil wealth and booming megacities like Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria is still heavily dependent on foreign aid to feed its population. Though it has Africa's fourth largest economy, more than 40 per cent of the population live in extreme poverty. Amid rampant corruption, successive governments have failed to address the growing hunger crisis in the north. In its latest annual budget, the current government allocated just 1.7 per cent of spending to agriculture and food security, even though the sector supports 35 per cent of Nigeria's labour force and contributes 22 per cent of its GDP. In June, it launched the Strategic Board of Nutrition, calling it a 'war room to battle against malnutrition in every corner of the country,' but has yet to lay out a clear strategy, budget or leadership structure for the initiative. 'The problem is systemic. It has been going on for a long time, and we need Nigerian solutions to Nigeria's problems,' said Dr Alakija, the WHO special envoy. 'We don't need committees. We don't need councils … we need to feed children. And the only way is to have security within our country.' Back at the nutrition clinic in Maiduguri, 25-year-old Falmata Bukar said that, as a mother, the hardest thing for her has been the struggle to provide food for her four children. When her youngest son fell ill with malnutrition and couldn't eat, the stress was unbearable and she found herself unable to eat either. 'If this clinic didn't exist, my family would've suffered,' she said. But she added that she was now optimistic for the future. 'The fact that tomorrow may be better gives me hope. At least today, my child is getting healthcare.'
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: 'We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.' More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance 'one of the most urgent global health threats'. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago. The thing to remember is that antibiotics are quite unlike other medicines. Most drugs work by manipulating human biology: paracetamol relieves your headache by dampening the chemical signals of pain; caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and as a result prevents drowsiness taking hold. Antibiotics, meanwhile, target bacteria. And, because bacteria spread between people, the challenge of resistance is social: it's as if every time you took a painkiller for your headache, you increased the chance that somebody else might have to undergo an operation without anaesthetic. That makes resistance more than simply a technological problem. But like that British doctor in 1954, we still often talk as if it is: we need to invent new 'weapons' to better defend ourselves. What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can't help thinking about another natural resource that helped create the modern world but has also been dangerously overused: fossil fuels. Just as Earth's geological forces turned dead plants from the Carboniferous era into layers of coal and oil that we could burn for energy, so evolution created molecules that scientists in the 20th century were able to recruit to keep us alive. Both have offered an illusory promise of cheap, miraculous and never-ending power over nature – a promise that is now coming to an end. If we thought of antibiotics as the 'fossil fuels' of modern medicine, might that change how we use them? And could it help us think of ways to make the fight against life-threatening infections more sustainable? The antibiotic era is less than a century old. Alexander Fleming first noticed the activity of a strange mould against bacteria in 1928, but it wasn't until the late 1930s that the active ingredient – penicillin – was isolated. A daily dose was just 60mg, about the same as a pinch of salt. For several years it was so scarce it was worth more than gold. But after production was scaled up during the second world war, it ended up costing less than the bottle it came in. This abundance did more than tackle infectious diseases. Just as the energy from fossil fuels transformed society, antibiotics allowed the entire edifice of modern medicine to be built. Consider surgery: cutting people open and breaking the protective barrier of the skin gives bacteria the chance to swarm into the body's internal tissues. Before antibiotics, even the simplest procedures frequently resulted in fatal blood poisoning. After them, so much more became possible: heart surgery, intestinal surgery, transplantation. Then there's cancer: chemotherapy suppresses the immune system, making bacterial infections one of the most widespread complications of treatment. The effects of antibiotics have rippled out even further: they made factory farming possible, both by reducing disease among animals kept in close quarters, and by increasing their weight through complex effects on metabolism. They're one of the reasons for the huge increase in meat consumption since the 1950s, with all its concomitant welfare and environmental effects. Despite the crisis of resistance, antibiotics remain cheap compared with other medicines. Partly – as with fossil fuels – this is because the negative consequences of their use (so-called externalities) are not priced in. And like coal, oil and gas, antibiotics lead to pollution. One recent study estimated that 31% of the 40 most used antibiotics worldwide enter rivers. Once they're out there, they increase levels of resistance in environmental bacteria: one study of soil from the Netherlands showed that the incidence of some antibiotic-resistant genes had increased by more than 15 times since the 1970s. Another source of pollution is manufacturing, particularly in countries such as India. In Hyderabad, where factories produce huge amounts of antibiotics for the global market, scientists have found that the wastewater contains levels of some antibiotics that are a million times higher than elsewhere. Like the climate crisis, antibiotic resistance has laid global inequalities bare. Some high-income countries have taken steps to decrease antibiotic use, but only after benefiting from their abundance in the past. That makes it hard for them to take a moral stand against their use in other places, a dilemma that mirrors the situation faced by post-industrial nations urging developing nations to forgo the economic benefits of cheap energy. This may be where the similarities end. While we look forward to the day when fossil fuels are phased out completely, that's clearly not the case with antibiotics, which are always going to be part of medicine's 'energy mix'. After all, most deaths from bacterial disease worldwide are due to lack of access to antibiotics, not resistance. What we are going to need to do is make our approach to development and use much more sustainable. Currently, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new antibiotics: it's hard to imagine a more perfect anti-capitalist commodity than a product whose value depletes every time you use it. That means we need alternative models. One proposal is for governments to fund an international institute that develops publicly owned antibiotics, rather than relying on the private sector; another is to incentivise development with generously funded prizes for antibiotic discovery. And to address the issue of overuse, economists have suggested that health authorities could run 'subscription' models that remove the incentive to sell lots of antibiotics. In one pilot scheme in England, two companies are being paid a set amount per year by the NHS, regardless of how much of their product is actually used. Finally, we have to remember that antibiotics aren't the only game in town. Supporting other, 'renewable' approaches means we get to use the ones we do have for longer. Vaccines are vital to disease prevention – with every meningitis, diphtheria or whooping cough vaccine meaning a potential course of antibiotics forgone. And the 20th century's largest reductions in infectious disease occurred not because of antibiotics, but thanks to better sanitation and public health. (Even in the 2000s, the threat of MRSA was addressed with tried-and-tested methods such as handwashing and cleaning protocols – not new antibiotics.) Given that antibiotics themselves emerged unexpectedly, we should also be investing more in blue-skies research. Just as we no longer burn coal without a thought for the consequences, the era of carefree antibiotic use is now firmly in the past. In both cases, the idea that there wouldn't be a reckoning was always an illusion. But as with our slow waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, coming to appreciate the limits of our love affair with antibiotics may ultimately be no bad thing. Liam Shaw is a biologist at the University of Oxford, and author of Dangerous Miracle (Bodley Head). Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Profile, £11.99) Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John S Tregoning (Oneworld, £10.99) Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History by Dorothy H Crawford (Oxford, £12.49)
