GENEVA: Doctors Without Borders charity said Friday that a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished, blaming Israel’s “policy of starvation.”
The medical aid group known by its French acronym MSF said that “Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and health care workers themselves now fighting to survive.”
It said that its staff in the besieged and war-torn Palestinian territory were receiving growing numbers of malnourished patients.
“Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent were malnourished,” it said.
At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, it said that the number of people needing care for malnutrition had quadrupled since mid-May, while “rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone.”
