Food alone won’t save Gaza’s starving population
A health worker measures the mid-upper arm circumference of a Palestinian boy suffering from severe malnutrition at Patient’s Friends Hospital in Gaza City on 29 July 2025
Omar Shabana writes in Al Jazeera on 14 August 2025:
Israel has imposed man-made starvation on the population of Gaza since the aggression against the enclave began in October 2023. This campaign intensified drastically after March 2025, when the Zionist occupation implemented even harsher restrictions on the already scarce aid allowed into Gaza. Since then, hundreds of men, women, and children have died from severe malnutrition. Doctors survive on meagre crumbs of bread and oil each day, often resorting to seawater to ingest much-needed electrolytes. Journalists have become too weak to carry out their duties, and men are too frail to risk their lives at GHF sites. The population now resembles skin stretched taut over bones.
Such severe malnutrition has, unfortunately, been witnessed throughout history, and its effects on the human body are well documented. Systems shut down one by one, fatigue envelops the victims, and the body begins to consume itself to death.
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Now commonly known as refeeding syndrome, this condition describes a dangerously rapid metabolic shift from a catabolic to an anabolic state. In starvation, the body suppresses insulin and relies on breaking down muscle and fat, depleting essential intracellular ions. Once feeding resumes, insulin surges, causing glucose and electrolytes to flood into cells. This sudden cellular shift sharply lowers blood levels of phosphate, potassium, and magnesium. Insulin also promotes sodium and water retention in the bloodstream, leading to fluid overload. If untreated, these changes can cause catastrophic damage to the heart, lungs, nerves, and blood, resulting in arrhythmias, respiratory failure, and death.