DaysofPal – The slow, relentless war of starvation in Gaza is claiming more lives each day. The Ministry of Health said Friday that four more Palestinians, among them children, had starved to death in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 201, including 98 children, since the siege began.
These deaths are not the result of scarcity alone, but of an orchestrated blockade. In the same 24-hour period, Israeli forces killed 16 people and wounded 250 others as they tried to reach humanitarian aid distribution points controlled by Israel with US backing.
More than 12,249 Palestinians have been wounded, and 1,772 have been shot dead while awaiting or approaching aid since the start of the genocide.
World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that people in Gaza are perishing “not only from hunger and disease, but also in the desperate search for food,” calling for immediate humanitarian corridors to evacuate the sick and wounded.
Since May 27 alone, more than 1,600 people have been killed and nearly 12,000 injured while scrambling for food. “Malnutrition is widespread, and starvation deaths are rising,” Tedros said, describing a population trapped under blockade, repeatedly displaced, and cut off from basic services.
A team of UN human rights experts accused Israel on Thursday of intensifying a “campaign of extermination” against the Palestinian people.
They said more than half a million people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, are on the brink of famine, while the rest are enduring emergency levels of hunger. Every one of Gaza’s 320,000 children under the age of five is at risk of severe malnutrition.
“These crimes are unfolding as Palestinians, especially children, are starving en masse due to the denial of food, water, healthcare, and shelter,” the experts said, adding that so-called humanitarian pauses and airdrops are “grossly insufficient” to address the scale of the crisis.
They stressed that Israel’s deliberate obstruction of aid has created living conditions that “amount to the physical destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” acts they said meet the definition of genocide under international law.
The experts also pointed to the killing of more than 1,000 Palestinians by Israeli forces while they waited in aid lines, underscoring that starvation is being used alongside direct violence as a weapon of war.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the overall death toll from Israel’s genocide has now reached 61,330, the majority women and children, with 152,359 wounded. Thousands more remain entombed beneath the rubble, unreachable to rescue workers.
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