When you hold a starving baby in your hands, you feel how fragile life is.
I saw starving children every day in Gaza, either in the medical facilities or in the streets with their mothers, begging for food. The toddlers look like babies, and older children are the size of toddlers. If they have enough energy to move, they’re not playing because they’re so traumatised by the bombing, and they’re just looking for water or scraps of food. The mothers keep going because they have to survive – they can’t let their children die; they’re distraught by the state their children are in.
Palestinian child Yazan Abu Foul, 2, who is suffering from severe malnutrition, is held by his mother, Naima.Credit: EPA
But they’re all wasting away, and they don’t have to. There are hundreds of trucks at the border with all the food that is needed, all the infant formula, all the medical supplies. They’ve been there for months with everything that’s needed for the people of Gaza, especially for the infants, to survive. It makes you question humanity and really wonder: What has gone wrong with the world, that we’re still in this situation where there is so much hatred against people who are defenceless?
The longer-term medical effects of being deprived of food include stunting and wasting. The children will not reach their potential in life if they’re severely malnourished as infants. They won’t develop properly, physically and physiologically, and it can affect mental development, being deprived of all the nutrients that they need. These children don’t have the start in life that they should, and this will affect the whole population.
We haven’t received any medical supplies since March 2, apart from nine trucks that were allowed in by the Israeli authorities. But then they made the trucks come on roads that were very unsafe, in the middle of the night, and eventually they were attacked. And this makes it impossible to continue bringing in medical supplies.
I’ve worked in conflict zones for 20 years. And although the people of Gaza are some of the bravest and most determined that I’ve ever met, they are also a defenceless population: children, infants, women, the disabled, the elderly, all the vulnerable and young adults who are missing their limbs. They’re having to run and hide, and they’re being bombed and starved. It could be stopped by the world but nothing’s being done about it.
Australian medic Claire Manera, inset, has been working with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Gaza.Credit:
The people of Gaza have been through hell, not just for the past two years but for decades. So they can tell when you’re giving false hope; if a child is not going to survive, then we must be honest. I remember standing by while a five-year-old girl had her dressings changed on third-degree burns, without enough pain medication. She was screaming in agony, and all her parents could do was stand by and watch. And even then, we had to tell the parents that we did not know if the girl would survive – especially without adequate nutrition to heal and recover.
At Nasser Hospital I would see emaciated babies in the neonatal ICU and a paediatric ICU. But while I was there, the Israeli forces attacked the hospital twice – they’d send rockets through the windows of the hospital to target certain individuals who they wanted dead. One of them was said to be an extremely brave journalist who was a patient in the hospital at the time.
