Without medical care to prevent refeeding syndrome, aid could trigger a deadly new crisis.
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. Chilling accounts between 1920 and 1940 in the Soviet Union paint a similar picture. Performers collapsed mid-performance, dying where they stood. People dropped dead in the streets as if simply falling asleep. Desperation reached such extremes that court records tell of a mother dismembering her unconscious husband, believing him dead, to feed their children.
