DayofPal– Four-year-old Mustafa Mohammed Yassin took his final breath at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza as his tiny body was ravaged by malnutrition and dehydration.
His death, confirmed by Gaza’s Health Ministry, is the latest in a growing toll of children perishing amid a deepening humanitarian catastrophe that health officials and international agencies are now calling a man-made famine.
“This child had the right to live, to grow, to laugh. But Israel took that away,” said Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense. “If no food or water enters Gaza, more children will die like Mustafa.”
Basal’s words are a stark warning of the current catastrophe in Gaza. Mustafa is not the first child to die of hunger in Gaza, he added, and “if the siege continues, he will not be the last.”
Gaza has been under a crippling blockade by Israel since October 2023, a siege that health experts say has pushed the enclave into a state of total humanitarian collapse.
According to the Health Ministry, the cause of Mustafa’s death was severe malnutrition, the result of a starvation policy that has cut off food, water, and medical aid from Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
The World Food Programme (WFP) says over 70,000 children in Gaza are now facing severe malnutrition. Aid trucks, they say, are arriving at a trickle, far from what’s needed to prevent disaster
“A drop in the ocean,” is how the UN agency described current aid levels, urgently calling for safe, unrestricted access into the strip.
Just days before Mustafa’s passing, Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan revealed a harrowing statistic: in just 48 hours, 29 children and elderly people had died of hunger-related causes. “The death toll could soar,” he warned, if aid continues to be obstructed.
Only 7 or 8 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functioning, and over 90% of medical supplies are exhausted, Abu Ramadan said. He also confirmed that the most recent aid convoys brought only flour for bakeries, no medical aid was included.
In a rare statement, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. The rapporteur urged the UN General Assembly to take immediate action to break the siege and end the “mass suffering” of Gaza’s people.
According to the Government Media Office in Gaza, the territory needs at least 500 aid trucks and 50 fuel trucks every day to meet its most basic humanitarian needs.
Since October 7, Israel, with the full backing of the United States, more than 175,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured, most of them women and children. Over 11,000 remain missing under the rubble, and hundreds of thousands are displaced without access to food, clean water, or medical care.
In the face of this worsening crisis, Mustafa Yassin’s death is more than a tragedy, it’s a symbol of broken systems, of delayed international response, and of a world that has so far failed to stop what many now call a deliberate famine.
“Mustafa should have lived,” said Basal. “If the world has any humanity left, it must act now—before more children join him in death.”
Shortlink for this post: https://daysofpalestine.ps/?p=63236
