As a medical aid worker, I’ve never seen suffering like Gaza. It must end
Palestinian mother Alaa Al-Najjar mourns her three-month-old baby Yehia, who died due to malnutrition amid a hunger crisis, according to medics, in Khan Younis on 20 July 2025
Shameela Islam-Zulfiqar writes in Middle East Eye on 22 July 2025:
As a medical doctor, humanitarian aid worker and mother, I have spent the past two decades responding to crises in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and beyond. I have treated children clinging to life from preventable illnesses, supported traumatised women through childbirth in war zones and witnessed the devastating human toll of blockades, bombings and bureaucratic cruelty.
Despite all this suffering, nothing compares to what we are witnessing amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Today, the Gaza Strip is collapsing under the weight of a man-made famine, with women and children bearing the brunt of what UN experts have called “intentional” and “politically motivated starvation” – not caused by disaster, but by design.
In all my years of fieldwork, I have never seen such a systematic assault on maternal and child health. This is not a humanitarian crisis in the abstract. It is the intentional denial of food, water, and medicine to an entire civilian population – an atrocity unfolding in full view of the world.
Deliberate starvation
Humanitarian agencies like my own, Action For Humanity, are being routinely denied access to Gaza.
Meanwhile, the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” – a sham organisation – is being weaponised: at best for political gain, at worst to deepen the suffering of Palestinians. Food, fuel, medical supplies, and even infant formula are being withheld.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 71,000 children under five and nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition. UN Women estimates that over 557,000 women are facing severe food insecurity.