‘Starvation Is Everywhere’: Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror

PALESTINE ISRAEL GAZA GENOCIDE, 1 Sep 2025

Yarden Michael and Nir Hasson | Haaretz - TRANSCEND Media Service

In recent weeks we spoke by video with doctors around the Gaza Strip. Through virtual tours of medical facilities, we sought to document the situation in which thousands of children suffer from severe acute malnutrition. What we saw was of catastrophic proportions. 

21 Aug 2025 – Bayan Saqer is lying on a bed. Her mother is supporting her, holding her head. She’s 10, very thin, frail and weak. Her body is limp. She weighs 17 kilograms (37 pounds).

“That’s the weight of a 4-year-old,” says Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, director of the pediatric department in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. “She’s not suffering from any disease, only malnutrition.” Two months ago she weighed 24 kilograms, the girl’s mother says.

Dr. al-Farra shows Bayan’s protruding ribs, her scrawny hands. She squeezes his hand and manages to sit up during the examination, but her eyes are lifeless. He asks her to say something; she has to make an effort to say her name. During our conversation it emerges that the father of the family was wounded at the start of the war and lost a leg. Obtaining food became an impossible task.

“There is no food,” the mother says, “and even if there is, we have no money to buy it.”

We held a virtual encounter with Al-Farra and his patients this past Monday via a video call. In the past few weeks, we’ve sought to document what starvation looks like in Gaza, to witness the gravity of the situation with our own eyes. Israel doesn’t allow journalists into the Strip, but via video we’ve been able to conduct real-time, online tours of hospitals and clinics.

For this article we conducted four such tours, in different places, and conducted separate conversations with another 12 doctors, 10 of them volunteers from the United States and Britain, who are currently in the Gaza Strip or were there recently. What we saw there left no room for doubt about the scale of the horror.

The tour of Nasser Hospital, in the southern part of Gaza, lasted about an hour. Al-Farra went from bed to bed, while another member of the hospital staff held the camera. We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out. Their hair had turned yellow or fallen out, their faces were wrinkled and their abdomens bloated. Their bodies were limp; many had marks on their skin. Some looked totally apathetic.

By means of this and our other video tours, as well as in the conversations with physicians and members of humanitarian organizations, we were able to document the current condition – and, when possible, the medical history – of some 50 children (and a few adults) who are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

It was impossible to obtain reliable information regarding about half of the children, because of the chaos that reigns in the Strip. In 27 cases, however, our conversations with doctors, family members and staff working at several official bodies in Gaza revealed a clearer picture: Seventeen youngsters had deteriorated into a state of severe malnutrition without preexisting health conditions; 10 suffered from previous illnesses.

This is the place to say two things about preexisting health conditions. First, we found that the medical ailments we encountered were a result of the catastrophic living conditions in the Strip during the last 22 months, or they had become aggravated acutely because of hunger. Second, the physicians we spoke to repeatedly clarified that even with respect to people who are already ill, severe acute malnutrition is not inevitable.

Based on our conversations, a simple fact emerged: Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases, and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying to themselves.

Most of the photographs that accompany this article were taken at our request, some of them during the virtual tours or about the same time. Others were taken by authorized sources affiliated with international aid organizations. A further batch was taken by doctors themselves in a manner that preserved precise time- and GPS-related data. Haaretz examined the information accompanying the images in order to substantiate their reliability.

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READ MORE:

• An IDF investigation rejected the Gaza famine, but experts say it only reaffirmed it
• ‘No hunger in Gaza,’ say Netanyahu, the Israeli army and media – as starvation worsens
• Famine by design: How Israel ignored warnings over hunger and starved Gaza

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