Nasma Ayad knows she is running out of time. In a dim hospital room in Gaza City, she strokes the thinning hair of her eight-year-old daughter, Jana. (Also read: U.S. Envoy Meets Netanyahu Amid Gaza Truce Deadlock and Hunger Crisis)
Once treated for malnutrition, Jana has withered to just 11 kilograms. She can barely see, can no longer speak, and is too weak to stand.
Her mother says she is relapsing as food and medical care in Gaza collapse under months of conflict and blockade.
“I feel I’m slowly losing my daughter, day after day,” Ayad said. “Everything she’s suffering from is multiplying.”
A Family Already Scarred by Loss
Jana’s sister, Joury, died on July 20 from kidney complications worsened by malnutrition. Both girls were added to Gaza’s medical evacuation list last September, but no evacuation ever came.
“She started having an edema,” said Suzan Marouf, a therapeutic nutritionist at Patient Friend’s Benevolent Society Hospital, describing how protein deficiency causes fluid to swell a child’s limbs and body.
Ayad now hopes that at least Jana can be evacuated for treatment outside the Gaza Strip. “I am calling for the urgent referral of Jana as soon as possible,” she said.
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A Growing Humanitarian Emergency
Gaza’s health ministry reports 156 deaths from hunger-related causes, including 90 children, most in the last few weeks. The U.N.-backed Famine Review Committee warned Tuesday that a worst-case scenario of famine is already unfolding without immediate action.
The World Food Programme says it still struggles to deliver enough aid, despite Israel’s weekend announcement of new steps to ease access.
It’s a complete blame game over aid. Israel and the United States insist Hamas is taking it for themselves, a charge the group flatly denies.
The UN’s on-the-ground view is different: they say they haven’t seen widespread theft and that the real holdup is Israel’s restrictions on access. Hamas then fires back with their own accusation—that Israel is intentionally using starvation as a weapon of war, which Israeli officials reject out of hand.
For Ayad, these debates feel distant. She has already buried one child and is fighting for another.
