Starving since the day he was born
Fadi al-Zant, 6, was evacuated to southern Gaza after facing starvation at the Kamal Adnan Hospital in Gaza City
Mark Scialla reports in Al Jazeera on 20 October 2024:
In June, Nour el-Hourani watched with tears in her eyes as doctors tried to revive her baby. Her son, five-month-old Abdel Aziz, had been starving since the day he was born, and now his heart had stopped beating. The lights in the neonatal unit flickered from a lack of fuel in the hospital’s generator, occasionally leaving doctors to work in the dark. They administered adrenaline and oxygen and used their fingers to pump his chest. For several minutes, the heart rate monitor showed a flat line.
The doctors kept trying long after what was usual for resuscitation and eventually got a pulse. Abdel Aziz was still unconscious but breathing again with the help of machines. His belly was bloated and his limbs were too thin for an infant, telltale signs of malnourishment. By this age, he should have been about double his birth weight. But he weighed less than he had when he was born.
Starvation spreads
Within days of a Hamas-led attack on Israel during which 1,139 people were killed and about 250 taken captive, Israel cut off fuel, food and water to Gaza. Within weeks, starvation had spread in the north of the Gaza Strip. Nour, who is 28 years old, was six months pregnant with her first child when the first bombs began to fall on Gaza.
In December, she was displaced to Kamal Adwan Hospital. Nour is a nurse and volunteered in the emergency department. But later that month, Israeli forces laid siege to the hospital and detained at least 70 medical workers. Nour wanted to stay close to the hospital as her due date was nearing. But she was forcibly evacuated along with more than 2,500 others.
She went to the Jabalia refugee camp, where she slept on a duvet on the floor of a school-turned-shelter alongside thousands of other people. Fresh food was scarce. There was no bread or meat. She ate canned beans or peas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wasn’t enough to keep her nourished.
“Getting food supplies was very difficult,” she says. “No vegetables, no fruits are available in the market. Whatever is available is inedible like rotten potatoes, which animals wouldn’t eat.”
Like many Palestinians in Gaza, Nour ate animal feed and foraged for a wild herb known as khubaiza to survive. Occasionally, her husband would chase down boxes of humanitarian aid that were airdropped by the United States and Jordan. She says the food in them was sometimes expired and the cans were rusted.
Jabalia was cramped and filthy. Sewage was overflowing into the street and there was little access to clean water. Nour says she drank rainwater. “We were swimming in sewage,” she says. “We could smell corpses and carcasses.”
Amid bombardment, a birth
Late one night in January, Nour went into labour. It was during a bombardment, and, worried that Israeli forces would kill anyone in a vehicle, she decided to walk back to Kamal Adwan Hospital, which has Gaza’s only neonatal unit and was the last functioning medical centre in the north for many months.
“It was scary. No one was in the street,” she recalls. Nour gave birth to Abdel Aziz on January 27 with no anaesthesia, then walked 2km (about 1 mile) to her home that same day with her husband and newborn son. By the time Abdel Aziz was born, nine in 10 people in northern Gaza ate only one meal a day. Mothers need to be well-nourished to nurse their babies, and Nour wasn’t producing enough breast milk. She searched all over the north for infant formula but there was none to be found.
“There was no formula available for 10 days,” she says. “So my son suffered from severe dehydration.”