'Damage across generations': The long-term effects of starvation in Gaza

SBS Australia

21 hours ago

Israel has announced it will make way for humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza but aid and medical experts say it may not be enough to address mass starvation and the long-term consequences of malnutrition. Israel denies reports of starvation in Gaza, after the World Health Organization and a raft of aid groups warned of the consequences of mass starvation in the besieged territory.
Israel cut off all supplies to the territory in March, then reopened them in May, allowing in far fewer trucks than before the blockade, which the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network described as "a drop in the ocean" of what would be needed to feed Gaza's population.
Why Gaza's children are more likely to die of starvation Experts say the ramifications could be felt for generations to come.
Associate professor Nina Siversten, a nursing and family health lecturer at Flinders University, told SBS News children in Gaza are at the most severe risk of the effects of starvation.
Young children have higher needs for nutrition than adults and fewer fat and muscle reserves to rely on when they go hungry. "They're more likely to die, especially from common infections like diarrhoea and pneumonia because starvation already weakens their really fragile immune system," Siversten said. The long-term consequences of malnutrition are also far more profound for young children than adults. For the first thousand days of a baby's life, its brain is developing rapidly and prolonged malnutrition can have catastrophic consequences on this process, including permanent brain damage.
"Malnutrition during this crucial window under two years old children really increases the risk of life-long disability," Siversten said.
Metabolic and immune responses to starvation in childhood also lead to higher risks of developing chronic diseases later in life, including mental health issues such as schizophrenia. While intensive medical care can help children recover from severe malnutrition, Silversten noted that the widespread destruction of hospital infrastructure in Gaza means its medical system cannot support children's recoveries from these acute states. Siversten is also concerned about how the damaging effects of this starvation will manifest in future generations of Gazans as it can affect how "genes are switched on and off".
"We call this epigenetic inheritance — essentially even if their children have enough to eat, they still might inherit risks of poor health because of what their parents went through."
The effects of malnutrition can be passed down through families, as was seen in children whose parents experienced the Dutch famine during World War Two known as the Hunger Winter. "We could follow them on and that generation, we could see that they had higher rates of disease as adults — and their children too showed signs of health problems that linked to that original period of starvation," Silversten said.
"We're not just talking about a lost childhood, we're talking about damage that can echo across two or maybe even three generations."
The Israeli army declared a 'tactical pause' in military operations in parts of the Gaza Strip to facilitate the safe passage of humanitarian aid convoys. Source: AAP / Mohammed Saber/EPA Aid organisations resume deliveries Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied the reports of widespread starvation in Gaza, calling it a "bald-faced lie" and saying there is no policy of starvation or starvation in the enclave. But under global pressure from world leaders, the Israeli military said humanitarian corridors will be in place from 6am to 11pm local time to allow the United Nations (UN) and aid organisations to deliver food and medicine to the population in Gaza. Tom Fletcher from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) welcomed the announcement by the Israeli military.
"In contact with our teams on the ground who will do all we can to reach as many starving people as we can in this window," he wrote on X.
UNICEF posted to X that the aid flow is an "opportunity to begin to reverse this catastrophe and save lives". "The entire population of over two million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80 per cent of all reported deaths by starvation are children," it wrote. Last week, more than 100 humanitarian aid organisations, including Medicins Sans Frontières (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, signed a joint statement sounding the alarm about mass starvation in Gaza.
Gaza health officials last week said malnutrition was killing Palestinians faster than at any point in the 21-month war — reporting 15 people, including a six-week-old baby, starved to death in 24 hours.
'We're caring while we start to starve' Journalists and doctors have also been documenting their own hunger in Gaza. Dr Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF's deputy medical coordinator in Gaza, said in one video posted to the organisation's Instagram he has been surviving on one meal per day for several months. Mughaisib described the body's response when it is deprived of food, including burning its own fat and muscle tissue to survive. "We are caring for patients dying of hunger while we ourselves are starting to starve," he said. "We are expected to save lives while our own are slowly being consumed."
The Israeli army declared a 'tactical pause' in military operations in parts of the Gaza Strip on 27 July, to facilitate the safe passage of humanitarian aid convoys. Source: EPA / MOHAMMED SABER/EPA While aid deliveries will go some way to alleviating hunger among the estimated 2.1 million Gazans currently experiencing food insecurity, head of humanitarian at Oxfam Australia, Lucia Goldsmith, told SBS News it is "nowhere near enough" to fully address the problem. Goldsmith said around 420,000 pallets of aid have accumulated outside Gaza's borders in the months since Israel imposed its aid blockade. "To give you an idea, that would cover 101 football fields — so that's the amount of aid that's waiting to cross into Gaza. So, a couple hundred trucks is obviously better than nothing but clearly not enough," she said. Goldsmith also expressed concern about Israel's airdrops of aid that started on the weekend, which she said are "inefficient" as well as dangerous.
"What also happens is that those who need the most — that's children, pregnant women, elderly people, people with disabilities, struggle to access these supplies," she said.
A 'man-made' crisis Following the joint statement signed by aid organisations, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Gaza is suffering "man-made" mass starvation caused by an Israeli aid blockade. Netanyahu has also accused Hamas of stealing aid — however a United States government report completed in June found no evidence of systemic theft of US-funded humanitarian supplies and according to one New York Times report, senior Israeli military officials said they have not discovered proof of this claim.
With reporting from the Australian Associated Press and Reuters.