GENEVA, July 25, 2025 (WAFA) - Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today that Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and health care workers themselves now fighting to survive.
“MSF staff are receiving an increasing number of malnourished patients at its clinics, while they themselves struggle to find sufficient food. Across screenings at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years old and pregnant or breastfeeding women were malnourished. At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, the number of people enrolled for malnutrition has quadrupled since May 18, while rates of severe malnutrition in children under 5 have tripled in the last two weeks alone,” said MSF in a statement.
“These food distributions are not humanitarian aid, they are war crimes committed in broad daylight and presented to the world with compassionate language,” said Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF deputy medical coordinator in Gaza. “Those who go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's food distributions know that they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head.”
“We see the dire consequences of these shortages in Gaza on a daily basis in our clinic,” says Caroline Willemen, project coordinator at the MSF clinic in Gaza City. “We are now enrolling 25 new patients every single day for malnutrition. We see the exhaustion and the hunger in our own colleagues. Meanwhile, hundreds of people seeking desperately needed aid continue to be attacked by Israeli forces and private security contractors at food distribution sites run by the Israeli proxy, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).”
“What we are seeing is unconscionable; an entire population being deliberately cut off from food and water, all while the Israeli forces commit daily massacres as people scramble for scraps of food at distribution sites,” says Amande Bazerolle, MSF head of emergency response in Gaza. “Any shred of humanity in Gaza has been wiped out in the ongoing genocide.”
In the last two months, more than 1,000 people have been killed and over 7,200 injured, according to the Ministry of Health, as they attempted to collect aid, including a large proportion at the distribution sites of the GHF, which is backed and funded by the US government.
“In addition to people wounded at GHF sites, our teams have treated dozens of patients from recurrent massacres by Israeli forces as people wait for flour from trucks that pass by,” said the statement.
“In the emergency room of Sheikh Radwan clinic a few days ago, dozens of patients came in, both dead and wounded,” says Willeman. “These were people who had approached trucks for flour and were shot by Israeli forces.”
“To make matters worse, in the last week, community kitchens that provide food to patients and medical staff in hospitals have struggled to do so, some shutting down for days at a time. Even if they can deliver, it is only one meal a day of plain rice for patients who need nutrient-rich food to heal properly, and often nothing for staff. This is no longer about what people can afford. There is barely any food available throughout most of the Strip,” read the statement.
T.R.
