Gaza faces mass starvation as hunger deaths rise, aid groups say
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CTV News
9 hours ago
- CTV News
More Gazans die seeking aid and from hunger; burial shrouds in short supply
Omniya Mahra holds her sons Oday, 4, left, and Mohammed, 3, who suffer from malnutrition and a genetic nerve disorder, at the Friends of the Patient Hospital in Gaza City on July 29, 2025. (Jehad Alshrafi / AP Photo) Editor's note: This story contains a photo and details that may be upsetting to readers. CAIRO/GAZA - At least 40 Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire and airstrikes on Gaza on Monday, including 10 seeking aid, health authorities said, adding another five had died of starvation in what humanitarian agencies say may be an unfolding famine. The 10 died in two separate incidents near aid sites belonging to the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in central and southern Gaza, local medics said. The United Nations says more than 1,000 people have been killed trying to receive aid in the enclave since the GHF began operating in May 2025, most of them shot by Israeli forces operating near GHF sites. The GHF said there were no incidents at or near their sites on Monday. Reuters was unable to verify where the incidents took place. Bilal Thari, 40, was among mourners at Gaza City's Al Shifa hospital on Monday who had gathered to collect the bodies of Palestinians killed a day earlier by Israeli fire as they sought aid, Gaza health officials said. 'Everyone who goes there, comes back either with a bag of flour or carried back (on a wooden stretcher) as a martyr, or injured. No one comes back safe,' Thari said. At least 13 Palestinians were killed on Sunday while waiting for the arrival of UN aid trucks at the Zikim crossing on the Israeli border with the northern Gaza Strip, the officials said. At the hospital, some bodies were wrapped in thick patterned blankets because white shrouds, which hold special significance in Islamic burials, were in short supply due to continued Israeli border restrictions and the mounting number of daily deaths, Palestinians said. 'We don't want war, we want peace, we want this misery to end. We are out on the streets, we all are hungry, we are all in bad shape, women are out there on the streets, we have nothing available for us to live a normal life like all human beings, there's no life,' Thari said. There was no immediate comment by Israel on Sunday's incident. The Israeli military said in a statement to Reuters that it had not fired earlier on Monday in the vicinity of the aid distribution center in the southern Gaza Strip. It did not elaborate further. Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza and says it is taking steps for more aid to reach its population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, allowing airdrops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he would convene his security cabinet this week to discuss how the military should proceed in Gaza to meet all his government's war goals, which include defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages. Deaths from hunger Meanwhile, five more people died of starvation or malnutrition over the last 24 hours, Gaza's health ministry said on Monday. The new deaths raised the toll of those dying from hunger to 180, including 93 children, since the war began. UN agencies have said that airdrops of food are insufficient and that Israel must let in far more aid by land and quickly ease access to it. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid, said that during the last week, over 23,000 tons of humanitarian aid in 1,200 trucks had entered Gaza but that hundreds of the trucks had yet to be driven to aid distribution hubs by UN and other international organizations. Israel's military later said 120 aid packages containing food had been dropped into Gaza 'over the past few hours' by six different countries in collaboration with COGAT. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday that more than 600 aid trucks had arrived since Israel eased restrictions in late July. However, witnesses and Hamas sources said many of those trucks have been looted by desperate displaced people and armed gangs. Palestinian and UN officials said Gaza needs around 600 aid trucks to enter per day to meet the humanitarian requirements - the number Israel used to allow into Gaza before the war. The Gaza war began when Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage in an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to Israeli figures. Israel's offensive has since killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials who do not distinguish between fighters and non-combatants. According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive. (Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Mahmoud Issa; Additional reporting by Steve Scheer in Jerusalem; Editing by Alexandra Hudson and Gareth Jones) Nidal al-Mughrabi and Mahmoud Issa, Reuters
Globe and Mail
20 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
The wombs in Gaza will bear the scars of war
Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian-Canadian medical doctor born and raised in Jabalia Camp in the Gaza Strip, and a professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. In most places, a mother's womb is a sanctuary – a place of safety, warmth and beginning. In Gaza, however, it has become a battlefield. This war is not only being fought with bombs and bullets; it is being fought inside the bodies of women who carry life while surrounded by death, where it can even change how genes are expressed. As a physician, gynecologist and public health scholar, I have spent my life studying these mechanisms. As a Palestinian father who lost three daughters and a niece to Israeli shelling in 2009, I live this pain. I know what it means to bury children. And I know what it means to watch newborns inherit a world that has already betrayed them. But what haunts me more is how this pain can rewrite lives before they have even begun. In Gaza, trauma is not merely a feeling; it can become biology. Through hunger, displacement, fear and violence, it embeds itself in the womb and seeps into the genes of the unborn. This is not poetic metaphor. It is epigenetics: the scientific study of how trauma and environment can change gene expression without altering DNA sequence. Gaza is a living (and dying) case study of this phenomenon. Marsha Lederman: There is an abundance of shame – and rightly so – over the calamity in Gaza To be pregnant in Gaza is to carry a child under siege. It means enduring warplanes, displacement, starvation, dehydration and blocked health care. These are not just violations of dignity; they are assaults on biology. Chronic maternal stress floods the fetus with cortisol, which can alter how a child will respond to fear and regulate emotions. Malnourishment in pregnancy affects brain and organ development, increasing the risk for diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive impairments decades later. Gaza is often discussed in terms of immediate death tolls. But what is harder to quantify – and perhaps more devastating – is the quiet inheritance of pain in the next generation. Children born under siege are not only victims of today's war; they are living out the consequence of yesterday's, too. They carry the grief of their parents in their bones. Their bodies remember the hunger; their genes remember the fear. A child in Gaza, then, is not born into a neutral body. They carry the molecular signatures of war, imprinted before their first breath. Now imagine those biological scars being passed down across multiple wars, with no chance to recover between them. This is not just a humanitarian crisis; it is a generational erasure. Yet the world debates terminology. Is it a war? A conflict? A disproportionate response? We waste time on semantics while children are being born into trauma and ruin that can brand themselves into their futures. I am tired of hearing that this is a 'complex conflict.' There is nothing complex about a child being born malnourished because trucks carrying food are blocked. There is nothing ambiguous about women giving birth in shelters without clean water. And there is no moral grey area when trauma is etched into the very biology of a population. We can't just talk about rebuilding the buildings of Gaza; we have to rebuild people. That starts with ceasing the violence – not tomorrow, not after another negotiation, but now. We must end the siege, open and maintain humanitarian corridors, protect hospitals, allow food and clean water, and defend expectant mothers like the sacred life-bearers they are. This is not just a humanitarian emergency – it is a biological one. Each day we delay action, we are not only letting people die; we are allowing pain to be passed on to the innocent, the unborn, the not-yet-named. Konrad Yakabuski: Symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state is a distraction from the suffering in Gaza What do we call it when wombs become war zones, when starvation and fear are passed down like genetic heirlooms, when a people are forced to inherit suffering? We must call it what it is: a crime. A crime not just against Palestinians, but against motherhood – against life itself. Every moment that the world fails to act, to speak, to intervene, is a moment that embeds deeper trauma in the next child born in Gaza. We are not only failing to save lives today; we are shaping a painful future. So where is the global reckoning with the reality that every missile strike may not only kill the present, but damage the future? I believe in healing. I have seen it. But healing requires justice. And justice begins with the courage to look, to name, to act. The world must remember what Gaza's children are not able to forget. They deserve more than survival. They deserve justice, equality, freedom, accountability, and a future unburdened by inherited hunger and fear.
CTV News
20 hours ago
- CTV News
‘We have not seen a difference on the ground': MSF Medical Activities Manager on aid in Gaza
Watch Doctors Without Borders, Medical Activities Manager Dr. Mohammad Fadlallah joins CTV to discuss his experience in Gaza and how dire the situation is.
