I’m writing this from Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase “skin and bones” doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her. We are witnessing deliberate starvation in Gaza right now.

This is my third time in Gaza since December 2023 as a volunteer surgeon with Medical Aid for Palestinians. I experienced mass casualty events and raised the alarm about malnutrition back in January 2024. But nothing has prepared me for the sheer horror I’m witnessing now: the weaponisation of starvation against an entire population.

The malnutrition crisis has become catastrophic since my last visit. Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die, not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery. The surgical repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, then they die. It is happening repeatedly, and it is heartbreaking to watch. Four babies have died in the last few weeks in this hospital – not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation.

Families and staff do their best to try to bring in what they can, but there simply isn’t enough food........

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