Gaza kids suffer from extreme malnutrition

Gaza Strip, Aug. 25: Not long after Texas surgeon Mohammed Adeel Khaleel arrived at a Gaza City hospital in early August, a 17-year-old was brought in with gunshot wounds to both legs and one hand, sustained when he went to collect food at an aid site.

In the emergency room, Khaleel said he noted the ribs protruding from the teen's emaciated torso, an indication of severe malnutrition. When doctors at Al-Ahli Hospital stabilized the patient, he raised his heavily bandaged hand and pointed to his empty mouth, Khaleel said.

"The level of hunger is really what's heartbreaking. You know, we saw malnutrition before, back in November, already starting to happen. But now the level is just, it's beyond imagination," Khaleel, a spinal surgeon on his third volunteer stint in Gaza, said in an interview.

On Friday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, the leading authority on global hunger crises, said for the first time that parts of Gaza are in famine and warned that it is spreading. For months, U.N. agencies, aid groups and experts had warned that Israel's blockade and ongoing offensive were pushing the territory to the brink.

In the 24 hours following the famine announcement, eight people in Gaza died of malnutrition-related causes, bringing the overall toll of such deaths during the war to 281, according Gaza's Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. A U.S. medical nonprofit working in Gaza says one in six children under 5 is affected by acute malnutrition.

Israel rejected the famine announcement, calling it an "outright lie" and pointing to its recent efforts to allow in more food after it eased a complete 2½ month blockade in May. It has accused Hamas of siphoning off aid — allegations disputed by the United Nations, which says Israeli restrictions and a breakdown of law and order make it extremely difficult to deliver food to the most vulnerable.

Khaleel, who spoke to The Associated Press ahead of the announcement, said the evidence of deprivation was already clear.

"Just the degree of weight loss, post-operative complications and starvation that we're seeing. That wouldn't surprise me at all if it was called famine," said Khaleel, who traveled to Gaza as an independent volunteer via the World Health Organization.

At Gaza City's Shifa Hospital earlier in the week, nutrition director Dr. Mohammad Kuheil led an AP journalist to the bedside of a thin-limbed girl. Aya Sbeteh, 15, was wounded in an airstrike. 

But her recovery has been set back by weakness from lack of food that her family says has reduced her weight by more than a third.

"All we have are grains like lentils, sometimes," said her father, Yousef Sbeteh, 44. "Even flour is unaffordable."

Another patient, Karam Akoumeh, lay with sunken cheeks, his thin skin stretched like plastic wrap across his rib cage. His intestines were seriously damaged when he was shot while going out to collect flour, his family said, compromising his digestive system.

Now he is one of 20 people at Shifa brought in for abdominal wounds and increasingly malnourished because of a shortage of intravenous nutritional supplements, the doctor said.

Akoumeh's father, Atef, said the lack of supplements compounded the hunger that reduced Karam's weight from 62 kilograms (136 pounds) to just 35 kilos (77 pounds). (AP)