©UNICEF/UNI879993/El Baba On 7 October 2025, Eitemad holds her son Ali in their makeshift tent in Al-Mawasi in the Gaza strip. Ali, two years old, suffers from malnutrition and growth retardation. He weighs just three kilograms. His family was displaced from eastern Khan Younis and now lives in a makeshift tent in the area. “I feel like I am watching my baby die in front of me,” his mother Eitemad said. “He is always tired, and sometimes he gets very sick at night. I walk for two hours to Nasser Hospital to get him treatment.” UNICEF cash assistance provided a lifeline for the family. “The money I received helped me to buy food, hygiene items, wood for cooking, and diapers for Ali,” she explained. “If I hadn’t received it, I would still be suffering, walking long distances to the food kitchen, which is far from here.” Her greatest wish is to secure treatment for Ali. “I wish I could take my son abroad so he can receive treatment. I don’t want to see him dying in front of me.”
Gaza Newborns Dying from Mothers’ Starvation
Geneva/Gaza: In the neonatal intensive care unit of a hospital in Gaza, scarred by repeated strikes, a premature baby girl weighing barely 900 grams fights for each breath inside a donated incubator. Her skin is almost translucent, veins threading like faint blue rivers beneath rice-paper flesh. Every few seconds, her chest jerks in a desperate, bird-like gasp. The nurse adjusts the oxygen mask dwarfing her tiny face and whispers, “Come on, little warrior.” Beyond the cracked window, the distant wail of another siren pierces the air, a grim reminder that even the ceasefire feels fragile.
This heartbreaking tableau, unfolding daily across Gaza’s battered maternity wards, is no longer the exception—it’s the devastating new reality.
Tess Ingram, UNICEF’s Communication Manager for the Middle East and North Africa, who has spent much of the past fourteen months reporting from inside the Strip, joined journalists via video link from Gaza during a Geneva briefing today. Her voice carried the quiet fury of someone who has witnessed the slow unravelling of childhood itself.
“I have met several newborns who weighed less than one kilogramme, their tiny chests heaving with the effort of staying alive,” Ingram said, her words painting scenes from the overwhelmed hospitals she visits. “At least 165 children are reported to have died painful, preventable deaths related to malnutrition during the war between Hamas fighters and Israel—and that is only the documented toll.”
The crisis, she explained, is a “lesser-known scourge” that starts long before birth: acute hunger among pregnant and breastfeeding women, a phenomenon virtually unknown in Gaza before October 2023. These mothers, their bodies depleted by siege and displacement, are delivering underweight or premature babies who arrive already battling for survival. Low-birthweight infants—those under 2.5 kilograms—are about twenty times more likely to die than those born at normal weight.
Before the war, Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded around 250 such fragile newborns each month, about five per cent of all births. In the first half of 2025, despite fewer overall births amid the chaos, the proportion doubled to ten per cent, or roughly 300 per month. In the three months before the October ceasefire, it surged to 460, nearly fifteen every day. “Low birthweight is generally caused by poor maternal nutrition, increased maternal stress and limited antenatal care,” Ingram said. “In Gaza, we witness all three, and the response to them is not moving fast enough, nor at the scale required.”
In October alone, 8,300 pregnant and breastfeeding women were admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition—a stark warning, Ingram stressed, that this “devastating domino effect” will echo for months. “This pattern is a grave warning, and it will likely result in low birthweight babies being born in the Gaza Strip for months to come,” she added. “This is not over.”
Even as the two-month-old ceasefire holds, the toll mounts. More than seventy children have been killed since it began on October 10, 2025, their deaths a bitter betrayal of the truce’s promise. Ingram’s accounts from the field reveal a generational wound: mothers in tent camps, flinching at shadows, passing trauma and hunger directly to the unborn. “Generations of families, including those being born now into this ceasefire, have been forever altered by what was inflicted upon them,” she said. “It is less visible than the blood and injury, but it is ubiquitous. I see and hear the generational impacts of the conflict on mothers and infants almost every day in hospitals, in nutrition clinics, in family tents.”
UNICEF and partners have scrambled to respond, replacing destroyed incubators and ventilators, distributing supplements to tens of thousands of women, and screening young children for malnutrition. Yet Ingram’s plea underscores the cruel irony: aid meant to save lives is strangled at every turn.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Monday that “persistent impediments” choke the flow— insecurity from sporadic violence, endless customs clearances, delays and outright denials at crossings like Kerem Shalom and Erez. Trucks sit idle for days, perishable food rotting in the sun, while northern Gaza remains segmented by debris fields laced with unexploded ordnance, blocking routes to the most isolated families. Rafah, the southern lifeline with Egypt, remains largely shuttered to commercial traffic, leaving markets barren of affordable fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy. Prices for basics have skyrocketed, turning a handful of lentils into a luxury after hours-long queues through rubble-choked streets.
“We really need to see all types of aid come in, particularly nutritious food through commercial routes as well,” Ingram urged. “Local markets need to be restocked with more commercial goods so that prices can drop and items such as fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy, can become affordable for families.” Without this surge, she warned, the neonatal wards will keep filling with gasping newborns, and the 165 deaths will climb toward catastrophe.
Ingram’s final words, delivered with unflinching resolve, cut through the static of the video feed: “No child should be scarred by war before they have taken their first breath. This is the brutal reality of the conflict and the Israeli aid restrictions, which depleted hospitals and starved and stressed mothers. So much suffering could have been prevented if international humanitarian law had been respected. So much of it still can be.”
As the briefing ended, another alarm echoed faintly from a Gaza ward— a sound Ingram knows too well, and one the world can no longer afford to ignore.
– global bihari bureau
