Gaza’s Government Media Office says at least 66 children have died of malnutrition during the war, blaming an Israeli blockade that it says has choked off milk, nutritional supplements and other food aid. The numbers land in the middle of a wider crisis that UNICEF says is worsening at an alarming rate, with more children being admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition and far too little food getting through.
The UNICEF figures in the packet are stark. The agency says 5,119 children between six months and five years old were admitted for treatment in May alone, almost 50 percent more than in April and 150 percent more than in February, when a ceasefire was in place and aid was entering in larger quantities. Over the first 150 days of the year, UNICEF said 16,736 children were treated for malnutrition in Gaza, an average of 112 children every day. The agency’s regional director, Edouard Beigbeder, said every one of those cases was preventable.
That line is the heart of the story. The packet does not describe a natural famine caused by weather or crop failure. It describes a man-made emergency, driven by restrictions on aid entry, damaged infrastructure and a war that has made ordinary delivery systems nearly unusable. Gaza’s media office calls the blockade a war crime and says Israel is using starvation as a weapon. The report also says it holds Israel’s allies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, responsible for the catastrophe and wants the United Nations to force crossings open.
At the same time, the humanitarian crisis is unfolding amid continued bombing. The report says at least 60 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on Saturday, including 20 in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighborhood, where consecutive strikes flattened residential buildings. It also says another air raid hit tents sheltering displaced people, and that one person was killed near an aid distribution point run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in southern Rafah.
The aid system itself has become part of the controversy. Al Jazeera reports that more than 550 Palestinians have been killed at or near GHF sites since the group began operating, and the UN secretary-general says the arrangement is inherently unsafe. Aid groups have criticized the distribution model as militarized and say people face serious danger even when they try to reach food. The report also says Israel’s Haaretz newspaper has described orders for soldiers to shoot at unarmed Palestinians at the sites, though that claim is presented as reporting rather than independently verified fact in the packet.
What emerges is a picture of a population trapped between hunger, bombardment and a delivery system that many humanitarian actors regard as broken. The evidence supports the conclusion that child malnutrition is not a side effect of the war in Gaza but one of its central human costs.
The scale of the crisis means the next question is not whether there is need, but whether food and treatment can actually reach children before their condition worsens. UNICEF’s figures show the emergency has become a daily drain on families and clinics, while the Gaza media office says the blockade is directly killing children. The evidence supports a bleak conclusion: as long as aid remains constrained and bombardment continues, malnutrition is likely to stay one of the war’s defining outcomes.
