Huda Abu Naja lies weak and emaciated on a thin mattress in her family’s tent in a displacement camp in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.
The 12-year-old Palestinian girl’s arms are painfully thin, and the bones on her torso are protruding from under her skin, a telltale sign of her acute malnutrition.
“My daughter has been suffering from acute malnutrition since March when Israel closed Gaza’s borders,” Huda’s mother, Somia Abu Naja, tells Al Jazeera, stroking her daughter’s face.
“She spent three months in hospitals, but her condition did not improve,” said Somia, explaining that she decided to bring Huda back to the family’s tent after witnessing five children die of starvation at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
“She used to weigh 35 kilos [77lbs], but now she’s down to 20 [44lbs],” Somia added.
Huda is just one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children suffering from malnutrition in Gaza, according to local health authorities, as Israel continues to block food and other humanitarian aid from entering the bombarded enclave.
On Friday, a United Nations-backed hunger monitor confirmed for the first time that more than half a million people were experiencing famine in northern Gaza – the first such designation ever recorded in the Middle East.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system warned that the figure could reach 614,000 as famine is expected to spread to the Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis governorates by the end of September.
According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 280 people, including more than 110 children, have died due to Israel-induced starvation since the country’s war on Gaza began nearly two years ago.
Children are being hit hard by the crisis, the IPC said on Friday, with an estimated 132,000 children under the age of five projected to be at risk of death from acute malnutrition by June 2026.
Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the chief paediatric physician at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, said 120 children are seeking treatment for malnutrition at the facility, while tens of thousands more are suffering in displacement camps with little assistance.
He told Al Jazeera that children in Gaza will suffer the consequences of malnutrition for the rest of their lives, as hospitals in the enclave are lacking the resources and supplies to respond to the crisis.
Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, also told Al Jazeera that an estimated 320,000 children across Gaza were in a state of severe malnutrition.
He said all wounded patients in hospitals were suffering from malnutrition, as well, amid Israel’s continued blockade of the enclave.
Israel has rejected the IPC’s findings, with its foreign ministry saying – despite mounds of evidence – that there was “no famine in Gaza”.
While Israel has allowed limited supplies into the territory in recent weeks amid global outrage over the starvation crisis, the UN and humanitarian groups say what is being allowed in remains woefully insufficient.
An Israeli-backed aid distribution scheme known as GHF has also been condemned as ineffective and deadly, with Israeli forces and US contractors killing more than 2,000 Palestinians as they sought food at the sites since late May.
The IPC famine classification has triggered a renewed wave of calls for Israel to urgently allow a massive and sustained influx of aid into Gaza.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday that the famine was a “man-made disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself”.
UN aid chief Tom Fletcher also said starvation was occurring “within a few hundred metres of food” as aid trucks were stuck at border crossings due to Israeli restrictions. He demanded that Israel allow food and medicine in “at the massive scale required”.
