Name: Aid groups warn that ‘mass starvation’ is spreading in Gaza | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T16:55:52.000Z
Duration: 9 min 6 s
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More than a hundred aid agencies have issued a joint statement warning that mass starvation is spreading across the Gaza Strip despite Israeli denials.

The signatures include major organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam.

The Hamas-run health ministry said more than 30 people have died from malnutrition in the past three days.

Israel has acknowledged the drop in the amount of aid reaching Palestinians, but insisted they were seeing no signs of famine.

Meanwhile, Israel has been continuing its military offensive.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said they had struck approximately 120 terror targets across the Strip.

Gaza's Hamas-run civil defense says at least 17 Palestinians have been killed in strikes since early on Wednesday morning.

Well, let's speak to our correspondent in Jerusalem, Yolande Nel.

Now, this is a warning that we've been hearing for some time, Yolande, but now aid agencies are saying starvation is occurring.

That's right, and they're talking about how, you know, with supplies now totally depleted, even their own colleagues in humanitarian organizations and their partners are wasting away, they say, before their eyes.

This comes after we've had journalists talking about how their freelance colleagues on the ground are no longer able to work.

We've had, of course, that joint statement by nearly 30 countries earlier in the week, including many of Israel's closest allies really complaining about the drip feeding of aid with the current system that's going on in Gaza.

But there was this figure that really stood out for me in this statement from the NGOs, and it says that on average there's only 28 lorry loads of aid being distributed within Gaza each day.

And, of course, that is just a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the needs of about two million people.

What are the aid agencies asking for Israel to do?

So what they want is for all of the the land crossings into Gaza to be opened up.

They want to have a full flow, a surge going in of clean water, of food, of shelters and, importantly, fuel as well, because that is, of course, part of the distribution effort.

They need fuel to get around to key establishments, the desalination plants, to hospitals, but also for the lorries to take the aid to people.

And they want this to be under what they're describing as a principled humanitarian mechanism overseen by the UN.

And this gets back to a row that's really going on still between the Israeli military establishment in particular and the UN with the Israeli authorities accusing the UN of not doing enough to get aid into the Gaza Strip.

Just yesterday, we had the Israeli military spokesman putting out drone footage showing piles and piles of supplies which had been cleared by Israeli security to go inside Gaza and it's not being picked up from inside the crossings.

Well, the UN says that really one of the main reasons for that has been that it's not getting the guarantees that Israeli military will not open fire when it picks up those supplies and desperate people are coming to try to get what they can.

Also, it says that it's got new restrictions that it's seen since Israel eased its total blockade on the Gaza Strip two months ago to start allowing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this controversial American group that Israel backs to operate, but also to allow in a trickle of aid from the UN.

And it's saying that it has to get Israeli military coordination for local drivers to go and pick up that aid from the crossings, then has to coordinate going through active military zones in the Gaza Strip at a time when roads are badly damaged.

There is still active combat going on and we know that those operations, the new Israeli military offensive in Deir Ebala, where there are key UN facilities based, that is also having a big impact on the aid distribution in Gaza.

Yolande, for the moment, thank you very much.

Let's speak to Dr Deirdre Noonan, an orthopaedic surgeon at al-Nasa Hospital in Gaza.

Dr Noonan, thank you very much for joining us here on BBC News.

You've been to work in Gaza on numerous occasions.

How have things changed since your last visit there in April?

It's massively worse on every parameter that I can perceive.

The situation with food is completely dire and totally unacceptable.

I am seeing babies who are starving, but it goes through all age ranges.

Even young, healthy adult men and women, formerly healthy adult men and women, are frequently just skin and bones here.

Our nurses don't have enough energy to stand up for the duration of their shift.

And we have children begging in the halls of the hospital, not just for food, but they are begging for fresh water.

So not even the very basic minimums of standards for human life are being met here.

What sort of medical issues are you facing when people come in for help?

As a surgeon, I'm treating extremity injuries and invariably these are related to the war.

The vast majority of them are people that have sustained explosive injuries from Israeli tank shells or missiles or airstrikes that most often have struck the people when they are in their tents in a displacement zone.

The second most common thing that I am seeing are people who have been wounded by gunshot wounds.

And again, about 90% of those are related to the GHF distribution sites.

And they are harrowing stories of people that were so desperate to feed their families that they went into mortal danger to do so and come out with no food and a life-changing injury.

Sometimes an injury, these bullet wounds, they're wounds that can make people lose their limb.

I have amputated multiple limbs on people that have been shot at the GHF.

And I also occasionally see a patient who has been wounded by falling down or by a road traffic accident.

But when I look deeper into the situation, almost every time it comes back to being related to violent attacks on Gaza, where one man who told me he was falling from a ladder, just a simple injury like I might see at home in Canada.

When I asked him a bit more about why he fell, he said he fell because the ladder was shaking because there had been an airstrike nearby.

I had another patient with a broken ankle.

And I wondered how it was possible to be hit by a truck in Gaza right now when there are so little fuel and so few vehicles moving around.

And he told me that it was a truck that was speeding away from an evacuation zone as he was walking down the side of the street.

So it's as though every single thing comes back to this assault and every single injury, even if it doesn't seem like violent trauma, actually has a violent origin.

How much riskier is it carrying out these operations on someone who is so weak from lack of food?

It's hard to quantify, but we are all struggling in this third week looking at the patients that we treated in our first week here and seeing outcomes that are much worse than we would normally have expected.

We see it right now in terms of the wounds, wounds that are not healing, wounds that are infected and we will see, I'm sure later down the line, the same effects in bone.

I treated a 12-year-old child a few days ago.

Normally, children heal their bones excellently.

This child had a very simple fracture, every reason to do well.

But two months after his injury, the bone was crooked and there were no signs of healing.

The surgeons were able to very easily move his bone back into position, which is showing the result of energy and nutrient deficiencies that people have.

So as time goes on, orthopaedic surgery, it takes a long time to see whether you are successful or not.

But what I'm seeing now and also by the number of limbs that I've amputated because of infection, my work does very little good when a patient does not have the adequate nutrition to cover.

Dr. Deidre Noonan, a Canadian orthopaedic surgeon working at the Al-Nasr Hospital in Gaza.