Israel starved Gaza. Now doctors fear it has permanently damaged a generation.
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports in Mondoweiss on 8 September 2026:
Tahrir Zidan, 41, repeatedly brings his five-year-old daughter, Tala, to the malnutrition clinic at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, hoping to receive nutritional supplements or treatment that might help his children grow. According to Zidan, Tala is 94 centimeters tall. The average height for a child her age is 109-110 centimeters. He says that her height and weight have barely changed over the past two years, and that at times she has actually lost weight. “She was diagnosed with malnutrition and short stature,” he explained.
Zidan, who is now displaced in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis after being forced from his home in Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, says he cannot afford to provide his three children with a balanced diet. Two of them, including Tala, suffer from malnutrition.
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Zidan’s children are not alone. For children growing up in Gaza after October 7, hunger is beginning to leave a mark that may extend far beyond the immediate effects of starvation. At the malnutrition clinic at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, doctors are increasingly seeing children who are not simply underweight but failing to grow in height. Some were born to mothers who endured pregnancy during periods of severe food deprivation; others have themselves spent years without adequate access to protein, healthy fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and other nutrients essential for growth.
Doctors at Nasser Hospital say they are beginning to see what they fear could become one of the most lasting consequences of Gaza’s hunger crisis: a generation whose physical growth and development have been permanently altered or stunted by prolonged malnutrition.