Six More Starve To Death In Gaza, Including Children, As Aid Fails To Reach All
Six more people, including children, have died of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza in the past 24 hours, Gaza's health ministry said on Sunday, bringing the total number of reported hunger-related deaths to 175 since the war began. Of these, 93 were children.
The announcement comes as Egypt's state-linked Al Qahera News reported that two trucks carrying 107 tonnes of diesel were expected to enter Gaza, a rare delivery after months of severe fuel restrictions.
Gaza's hospitals have been critically affected by fuel shortages, forcing medical staff to treat only the most urgent cases. It remained unclear by Sunday evening whether the trucks had reached their destination.
Fuel shipments have been rare since March, when Israel tightened its control over aid entering Gaza. Israel said the restrictions were aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages taken during its October 2023 attack.
While Israel has recently taken steps to ease aid flow — including temporary fighting pauses and designated aid corridors — UN agencies say these measures are far from sufficient. Airdrops continue, but aid groups insist that only land routes can meet the scale of need.
Palestinians desperate for food are often forced to risk their lives just to access a small amount of aid. Nearly 1,400 Palestinians have reportedly been killed since late May while waiting for food, many in areas under Israeli fire.
Mohammad Abu Taha, a 42-year-old father from Rafah, described one tragic scene. 'Thousands were queuing for food at dawn. Suddenly, we heard gunshots. There was no way to escape. People started running, pushing and shoving each other, children, women, the elderly."
'The scene was truly tragic: blood everywhere, wounded, dead," he added.
Aid workers and analysts say the Israeli military often fires warning shots near aid queues, contributing to the chaos and fear. The Israeli army denies targeting civilians and maintains it only acts when people get too close to military positions.
Thousands Flood Sydney Streets In Pro-Palestinian Rally
Tens of thousands of protesters marched across Sydney's Harbour Bridge on Sunday, calling for peace in Gaza and urgent food aid for civilians trapped in the conflict zone.
Despite heavy rain, the protest — dubbed the 'March for Humanity" — drew huge crowds, with some carrying pots and pans to symbolise hunger in Gaza. Others waved Palestinian flags and chanted slogans of solidarity.
Authorities estimated the crowd at 90,000, though organisers claimed up to 300,000 joined. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was among the participants.
Similar protests took place in Melbourne and other cities.
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August 03, 2025, 17:26 IST
News world Six More Starve To Death In Gaza, Including Children, As Aid Fails To Reach All
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First Post
9 hours ago
- First Post
After starvation, thirst grips Gaza: Aid workers say water crisis as severe as food shortage
In addition to the hunger crisis, Gaza is also in the grips of a severe water shortage. As the Israeli bombardment has destroyed most of Gaza's water supply and sanitation infrastructure, some small desalination units run by aid agencies are the only source of potable water, with most of the water used in Gaza drawn from wells in a brackish aquifer that has been further polluted by sewage and chemicals seeping through the rubble, spreading diarrhoea and hepatitis. read more Weakened by hunger, many Gazans trek across a ruined landscape each day to haul all their drinking and washing water — a painful load that is still far below the levels needed to keep people healthy. Even as global attention has turned to starvation in Gaza, where after 22 months of a devastating Israeli military campaign a global hunger monitor says a famine scenario is unfolding, the water crisis is just as severe according to aid groups. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Though some water comes from small desalination units run by aid agencies, most is drawn from wells in a brackish aquifer that has been further polluted by sewage and chemicals seeping through the rubble, spreading diarrhoea and hepatitis. COGAT, the Israeli military agency responsible for coordinating aid in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, says it operates two water pipelines into the Gaza Strip providing millions of litres of water a day. Palestinian water officials say these have not been working recently. Israel stopped all water and electricity supply to Gaza early in the war but resumed some supply later though the pipeline network in the territory has been badly damaged. Most water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed and pumps from the aquifer often rely on electricity from small generators — for which fuel is rarely available. COGAT said the Israeli military has allowed coordination with aid organisations to bring in equipment to maintain water infrastructure throughout the conflict. Moaz Mukhaimar, aged 23 and a university student before the war, said he has to walk about a kilometre, queuing for two hours, to fetch water. He often goes three times a day, dragging it back to the family tent over bumpy ground on a small metal handcart. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'How long will we have to stay like this?' he asked, pulling two larger canisters of very brackish water to use for cleaning and two smaller ones of cleaner water to drink. His mother, Umm Moaz, 53, said the water he collects is needed for the extended family of 20 people living in their small group of tents in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. 'The children keep coming and going and it is hot. They keep wanting to drink. Who knows if tomorrow we will be able to fill up again,' she said. Their struggle for water is replicated across the tiny, crowded territory where nearly everybody is living in temporary shelters or tents without sewage or hygiene facilities and not enough water to drink, cook and wash as disease spreads. The United Nations says the minimum emergency level of water consumption per person is 15 litres a day for drinking, cooking, cleaning and washing. Average daily consumption in Israel is around 247 litres a day according to Israeli rights group B'Tselem. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Bushra Khalidi, humanitarian policy lead for aid agency Oxfam in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories said the average consumption in Gaza now was 3-5 litres a day. Oxfam said last week that preventable and treatable water-borne diseases were 'ripping through Gaza', with reported rates increasing by almost 150% over the past three months. Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza and says it provides adequate aid for the territory's 2.3 million inhabitants. Queues for water 'Water scarcity is definitely increasing very much each day and people are basically rationing between either they want to use water for drinking or they want to use a lot for hygiene,' said Danish Malik, a global water and sanitation official for the Norwegian Refugee Council. Merely queuing for water and carrying it now accounts for hours each day for many Gazans, often involving jostling with others for a place in the queue. Scuffles have sometimes broken out, Gazans say. Collecting water is often the job of children as their parents seek out food or other necessities. 'The children have lost their childhood and become carriers of plastic containers, running behind water vehicles or going far into remote areas to fill them for their families,' said Munther Salem, water resources head at the Gaza Water and Environment Quality Authority. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD With water so hard to get, many people living near the beach wash in the sea. A new water pipeline funded by the United Arab Emirates is planned, to serve 600,000 people in southern Gaza from a desalination plant in Egypt. But it could take several more weeks to be connected. Much more is needed, aid agencies say. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said the long-term deprivations were becoming deadly. 'Starvation and dehydration are no longer side effects of this conflict. They are very much frontline effects.' Oxfam's Khalidi said a ceasefire and unfettered access for aid agencies was needed to resolve the crisis. 'Otherwise we will see people dying from the most preventable diseases in Gaza — which is already happening before our eyes.' (This is an agency copy. Except for the headline, the copy has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)
News18
9 hours ago
- News18
A young surgeon tries to save lives at crippled Gaza hospital
Agency: PTI Last Updated: Deir al-Balah (Gaza Strip), Aug 6 (AP) At Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip, nothing is sterilised, so Dr Jamal Salha and other surgeons wash their instruments in soap. Infections are rampant. The stench of medical waste is overwhelming. And flies are everywhere. Without painkillers, patients moan while lying on metal beds lining the corridors. There's no electricity and no ventilation amid searing heat, leaving anxious visitors to fan bedridden relatives with pieces of cardboard. Shifa, once the largest hospital in Gaza and the cornerstone of its health care system, is a shell of its former self after 22 months of war. The hospital complex the size of seven soccer fields has been devastated by frequent bombings, two Israeli raids and blockades on food, medicine and equipment. Its exhausted staff works around the clock to save lives. 'It is so bad, no one can imagine," said Salha, a 27-year-old neurosurgeon who, like countless doctors in Gaza, trained at Shifa after medical school and hopes to end his career there. But the future is hard to think about when the present is all-consuming. Salha and other doctors are overwhelmed by a wartime caseload that shows no sign of easing. It has gotten more challenging in recent weeks as patients' bodies wither from rampant malnutrition. Shifa was initially part of a British military post when it opened in 1946. It developed over the years to boast Gaza's largest specialized surgery department, with over 21 operating rooms. Now, there are only three, and they barely function. Because Shifa's operating rooms are always full, surgeries are also performed in the emergency room, and some of the wounded must be turned away. Bombed-out buildings loom over a courtyard filled with patients and surrounded by mounds of rubble. Salha fled northern Gaza at the start of the war — and only returned to Shifa at the beginning of this year. While working at another extremely busy hospital in central Gaza, he kept tabs on Shifa's worsening condition. 'I had seen pictures," he said. 'But when I first got back, I didn't want to enter." A young doctor and a war After graduating from medical school in 2022, Salha spent a year training at Shifa. That is when he and a friend, Bilal, decided to specialize in neurosurgery. But everything changed on Oct 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel's retaliatory campaign began. For the first few weeks of the war, Salha was an intern at Shifa. Because Israel had cut off Gaza's internet service, one of Salha's jobs was to bring scans to doctors around the complex. He had to navigate through thousands of displaced people sheltering there and run up and down stairwells when elevators stopped working. Once Israeli troops moved into northern Gaza, he and has family left. Bilal, who stayed in Gaza City, was killed a few months later, Salha said. Not long after Salha left, Israeli forces raided Shifa for the first time in November 2023. Israel said the hospital served as a major Hamas command and control center. But it provided little evidence beyond a single tunnel with two small rooms under the facility. It made similar arguments when raiding and striking medical facilities across Gaza even as casualties from the war mounted. Israel says it makes every effort to deliver medical supplies and avoid harming civilians. Under international law, hospitals lose their protected status if they are used for military purposes. Hamas has denied using hospitals for military purposes, though its security personnel can often be seen inside them and they have placed parts of hospitals off limits to the public. Israeli forces returned to Shifa in March 2024, igniting two weeks of fighting in which the military said it killed some 200 militants who had regrouped there. The hospital was left in ruins. The World Health Organisation said three hospital buildings were extensively damaged and that its oxygen plant and most equipment were destroyed, including 14 baby incubators. While all this was going on, Salha worked at a hospital in central Gaza, where he performed over 200 surgeries and procedures, including dozens of operations on fractured skulls. Some surgeons spend a lifetime without ever seeing one. When he returned to Shifa as a neurosurgeon resident, the buildings he used to run between — some had been rehabilitated — felt haunted. 'They destroyed all our memories," he said. A shrunken hospital is stretched to its limits Shifa once had 700 beds. Today there are roughly 200, and nearly as many patients end up on mattresses on the floor, the hospital manager said. Some beds are set up in storage rooms, or in tents. An extra 100 beds, and an additional three surgery rooms, are rented out from a nearby facility. The hospital once employed 1,600 doctors and nurses. Now there about half as many, according to Shifa's administrative manager, Rami Mohana. With Gaza beset by extreme food insecurity, the hospital can no longer feed its staff, and many workers fled to help their families survive. Those who remain are rarely paid. On a recent morning, in a storage room-turned-patient ward, Salha checked up on Mosab al-Dibs, a 14-year-old boy suffering from a severe head injury and malnutrition. 'Look how bad things have gotten?" Salha said, pulling at al-Dibs' frail arm. Al-Dibs' mother, Shahinez, was despondent. 'We've known Shifa since we were kids, whoever goes to it will be cured," she said. 'Now anyone who goes to it is lost. There's no medicine, no serums. It's a hospital in name only." There are shortages of basic supplies, like gauze, so patients' bandages are changed infrequently. Gel foams that stop bleeding are rationed. Shifa's three CT scan machines were destroyed during Israeli raids, Mohana said, so patients are sent to another nearby hospital if they need one. Israel has not approved replacing the CT scanners, he said. Patients wait for hours — and sometimes days — as surgeons prioritize their caseload or as they arrange scans. Some patients have died while waiting, Salha said. After months without a pneumatic surgical drill to cut through bones, Shifa finally got one. But the blades were missing, and spare parts were not available, Salha said. 'So instead of 10 minutes, it could take over an hour just to cut the skull bones," he said. 'It leaves us exhausted and endangers the life of the patient." When asked by The Associated Press about equipment shortages at Shifa, the Israeli military agency in charge of aid coordination, COGAT, did not address the question. It said the military "consistently and continuously enables the continued functioning of medical services through aid organizations and the international community.? Unforgettable moments From his time at the hospital in central Gaza, Salha can't shake the memory of the woman in her 20s who arrived with a curable brain hemorrhage. The hospital wouldn't admit her because there were no beds available in the intensive care unit. He had wanted to take her in an ambulance to another hospital, but because of the danger of coming under Israeli attack, no technician would go with him to operate her ventilator. 'I had to tell her family that we will have to leave her to die," he said. Other stories have happier endings. When a girl bleeding from her head arrived at Shifa, Salha's colleague stopped it with his hand until a gel foam was secured. The girl, who had temporarily lost her vision, greeted Salha after her successful recovery. top videos View all 'Her vision was better than mine," the bespectacled Salha said, breaking a smile. 'Sometimes it seems we are living in a stupor. We deal with patients in our sleep and after a while, we wake up and ask: what just happened?" (AP) RD RD RD (This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI) view comments First Published: August 06, 2025, 18:45 IST News agency-feeds A young surgeon tries to save lives at crippled Gaza hospital Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
New Indian Express
a day ago
- New Indian Express
Gaza civil defence says Israeli attacks kill 26
Gaza's civil defence agency said 26 people were killed by Israeli gunfire and air strikes on Tuesday, including 14 who were waiting near an aid distribution site inside the Palestinian territory. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that eight people were killed by Israeli gunfire while waiting for aid near the south Gaza city of Khan Yunis. Six more people were killed and 21 injured by Israeli fire in central Gaza while waiting for food near a distribution centre, according to Bassal. The Israeli army told AFP it was looking into the incidents. Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency and other parties. Thousands of Gazans gather daily near food distribution points across Gaza, including four belonging to the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its operations have been marred by chaotic scenes and near-daily reports of Israeli forces firing on those waiting to collect rations. Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods and aid into Gaza since the start of the war nearly 22 months ago have led to shortages of food and essential goods, including medicine, medical supplies and fuel, which hospitals rely on to power their generators. Bassal said that five people were killed by a nightly air strike on a tent in Al-Mawasi in south Gaza, an area Israeli authorities designated as a safe zone early on in the war.
