Sunday, 27 July 2025
Sunday, 27 July 2025
Pro-Palestinian groups gathered in New York City to demand an immediate end to Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
They held signs saying "Stop Starving Gaza now!," "Feed Gaza's Babies" and "Open the border, end the blockade."
Protests were also held in other cities including the capital Washington, DC, Chicago and San Francisco to demand an end to the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip as mass starvation has surged to unprecedented levels.
The UN on Tuesday condemned the "unacceptable pattern" of attacks on aid seekers in Gaza, despite repeated assurances from Israel that civilians would not be targeted.
Israel has killed more than 59,100 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, collapsed the health system and led to severe food shortages.
Reuters reported on Friday, Gaza is on the brink of running out of the specialised therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children, United Nations and humanitarian agencies say.
"We are now facing a dire situation, that we are running out of therapeutic supplies," said Salim Oweis, a spokesperson for UNICEF in Amman, Jordan told Reuters on Thursday, saying supplies of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a crucial treatment, would be depleted by mid-August if nothing changed.
"That's really dangerous for children as they face hunger and malnutrition at the moment," he added.
Oweis said UNICEF had only enough RUTF left to treat 3,000 children. In the first two weeks of July alone, UNICEF treated 5,000 children facing acute malnutrition in Gaza.
Nutrient-dense, high-calorie RUTF supplies, such as high-energy biscuits and peanut paste enriched with milk powder, are critical for treating severe malnutrition.
"Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished," a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday.
The WHO said that a programme in Gaza that was aiming to prevent malnutrition among the most vulnerable, including pregnant women and children under five, may have to stop work as it is running out of the nutritional supplements.
Gaza's food stocks have been running out since Israel, at war with Palestinian militant group Hamas since October 2023, cut off all supplies to the territory in March, lifting that blockade in May but with restrictions that it says are needed to prevent aid being diverted to militant groups.
As a result, international aid agencies say that only a trickle of what is needed, including medicine, is currently reaching people in Gaza.
UNICEF said that from April to mid-July, 20,504 children were admitted with acute malnutrition. Of those patients, 3,247 were suffering from severe acute malnutrition, nearly triple the number in the first three months of the year. Severe acute malnutrition can lead to death, and to long-term physical and mental developmental health problems in children who survive.
The WHO said on Wednesday 21 children under the age of five were among those who died of malnutrition so far this year.
Two more Palestinians died overnight from starvation, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday, bringing the total number of people who have starved to death to 113, most of them in recent weeks as a wave of hunger crashes on the Palestinian enclave.
