5 days ago
MSF workers in Gaza city fear for malnourished women and children as Israel takeover looms
YESTERDAY MORNING, STAFF who work at the Doctors Without Border/ Médecins Sana Frontiére's (MSF's) primary health clinic in Gaza city got a message from their project co-ordinator to go ground; the Israeli military had given an evacuation order for a building it was preparing to strike nearby.
The workers sheltered, the building shook from the impact of the strike, but no one was hurt.
Caroline Willeman, the MSF Project Coordinator said that starting the day this way has become the normal 'nightmare' of day-to-day life for everyone in Gaza, but when news broke that Netanyahu's security cabinet had approved plans to take control of Gaza city, it was devastating.
Caroline spoke to
The Journal
from Gaza city yesterday over Zoom.
Foremost on her mind was the injured and malnourished people that the teams she oversees are working with; how would they survive being displaced again?
'The idea that all of Gaza city could be emptied out is terrifying and unfathomable, it has happened before, people will remember the images of thousands of Palestinians returning to the city after being pushed out in January. Currently whole zones are evacuated, so people are squeezed into the West,' Caroline said.
She said that MSF is committed to staying in Gaza city for as long 'as it is feasible'.
'If this plan gets fully implemented, at some point, we will not be able to work here anymore,' Caroline added.
4-year old Julia is held by her father Ahmed after being injured in an airstrike at her home in Gaza city. 28 June 2025.
MSF.
MSF.
Currently over 80 MSF workers are providing services including water trucking (the delivery of safe drinking water), a primary health clinic that carries out around 600 consultations a day, and a sexual reproductive health service with two midwives, a mental health team, a health promotion team, and a malnutrition programme.
Parents desperately trying to enrol children in malnutrition programme
The malnutrition programme is for children under five and women who are pregnant or lactating. The number of people being treated through the programme has increased five fold since May. Currently 1500 people are enrolled, and there are more pregnant women and new mothers being treated through it than children under five.
'Mothers are choosing to feed their children before eating themselves.
'We treat people for both what we call moderate acute malnutrition and severe acute malnutrition. With the severe cases, if they are forced to evacuate, we won't be able to follow up with them anymore, they will lose the little support they have access to,' Caroline said.
Every day the clinic is having to turn away parents who are desperately trying to have their children who are under five enrolled in the programme because they have not met the criteria for malnutrition.
'In these cases we know that if the food situation doesn't improve in the next week, that child will become malnourished, it is a matter of time. You are forcing them to get worse before you can help them, but there is no other way. In terms of the supplies we have, we have to be this strict,' Caroline explained.
She said that people aren't being discharged from the programme because they aren't gaining enough weight:
'We provide therapeutic food that is meant to be eaten alongside real meals, they don't have those real meals, so they aren't actually getting better.'
MSF community health worker explains to the patients malnutrition facts before entering for the check up in MSF Gaza clinic in Gaza city. 4 June.
Injuries and deaths at aid distribution sites
MSF's teams in Gaza city also operate a small field hospital around the corner from Al Shifa Hospital with 13 beds, which is intended to relieve bed capacity in the hospital by taking patients for the last days of their hospital stays, in order to allow the emergency rooms to treat people rapidly when there are mass casualties.
A small number of their staff are also working in the Al Shifa Hospital Emergency Room.
This week MSF published a report that called for an immediate end to Israel's militarised food distribution scheme in Gaza, labelling it 'institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation'.
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Caroline Willeman speaking to The Journal from Gaza City yesterday.
The report was titled 'This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing' and it details how in the two clinics MSFs runs near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites, medics received 1,380 injured people and 28 dead bodies in June and July.
The patients included 174 suffering from gunshot wounds, including women and children, but for the most part they were young men and teen boys.
MSF said that Israeli military 'crowd control' tactics have been 'lethal' and have led to these injuries and deaths.
That's happening in northern Gaza, in the south, where Caroline and her team are, aid is being delivered by trucks that have been stocked by the World Food Programme.
'Desperate people bombard the trucks and then we see similar situations unfolding with people being shot at by the Israeli army, people being crushed, and sheer chaos.
'While there has been an increase in the number of trucks let in – and I want to be very clear that it is absolutely not enough – we are calling for a regular and sustained supply of aid to stop this chaos from happening,' Caroline said.
The MSF team is made up mostly of Palestinians, there are only four international staff members on rotation with the teams at the moment.
Caroline says that two weeks ago the situation with supplies became so dire that MSF was unable to provide food to the staff, recently the situation has improved only slightly.
A Palestinian child who suffers from malnutrition undergos a medical checkup in MSF clinic in Gaza city. 4 June 2025.
'We offer the staff one portion of rice for the working day. Many of my colleagues don't eat that, they take it home and feed it to their children.
'What keeps us going is our Palestinian colleagues, they have been doing this for 22 months. They're hungry and many live in tents with their kids,' Caroline said.
She said that the price of a kilo of sugar in the market in Gaza city has gone down from $110 per kilo to $12 per kilo.
'A colleague of mine described paying over $200 to get one piece of bread for each of her 31 extended family members.
'Two weeks ago there was absolutely no bread in the markets, and now we are seeing it again, but at these prices,' she said.
Caroline has been doing humanitarian work for the last nine years. In that time she has been in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and worked as part of a search and rescue team in the Mediterranean.
Yesterday she told
The Journal
that the scale of suffering she has witnessed in the last six weeks is beyond anything she has ever witnessed.
'It is what you are seeing on the news but in three dimensions, and it hits a million times harder. You see people lining up in the street with their jerry cans for water. You see the sheer level of destruction, it is unimaginable.
'I have never witnessed anything like this. I've never witnessed until now, a genocide with my own eyes,' Caroline said.
She added that one case that the team have dealt with in the last six weeks will be etched into her memory for life.
'We had a six-year-old boy called Abdullah whose body was, you could say, 35% covered in burns. He was injured in an airstrike at the school where he was living, because all of the schools have become shelters. He was one of five children. Both of his parents and all four of his siblings were killed in the same strike.
'His uncle, who is now his caretaker, kept saying to our doctors, 'Do you know how precious this boy's life is? That he is the only one to survive, do you know how precious he is?'
'That is a question that I would love to ask the world leaders who are in power, 'Do you realise how precious the children of Gaza are?', because it seems to me that none of them do,' Caroline said.
The Belgian aid worker said that after yesterday's news of Israel's plans, she is struggling to get her head around the idea that in the next two weeks, she will witness the situation for people in Gaza city get worse than the 'sheer devastation' she is seeing already every day.
You can find out more about MSF and ways to
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