Two-year-old Hasan Barbakh died of starvation on 24 June, after months of prolonged malnutrition, dehydration, an enlarged liver, and acute blood toxicity.
He would have turned three the next day.
Hasan was just over a year old when Israel launched its genocidal campaign on the Gaza Strip, cutting off every Palestinian in Gaza from the outside world.
Israeli displacement orders forced his family to move around like chess pieces. Not long after Israeli authorities imposed a total blockade in March, Hasan’s health began to deteriorate. He lost 2kg in weight.
“From the first week of the siege, [his weight] began to drop daily, and his voice grew weaker,” Hasan’s mother, Amna, told a field researcher from Defence for Children International – Palestine, where I work as an advocacy officer. “I sensed he was slowly fading away.”
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Hasan was admitted to the Nutrition Department at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis on 23 April.
Like every remaining medical facility in Gaza, it lacks medicine, infant formula, medical equipment, doctors, electricity, food and clean water to properly treat children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
Weaponised starvation
Palestinians in Gaza are now dying of starvation at an alarming rate. On Sunday alone, at least 19 people died from hunger, according to Gaza health authorities.
There is simply no food left, as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from entering, and its military forces kill Palestinians seeking assistance from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Starvation is entirely preventable. The death of even one child from hunger does not happen by accident. The starvation of one million children in Gaza is a genocide.
There is simply no food left, as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from entering, and its military forces kill Palestinians seeking aid
Hasan died the very morning that Defence for Children International – Palestine released a new report, Starving a Generation: Israel’s Famine Campaign Targeting Palestinian Children in Gaza.
It includes 33 documented cases of child starvation, among them Hasan, whose case was recorded by one of our field researchers in May. We updated the report to include his death just before publication.
I co-authored this report, which asserts that Israeli authorities are deliberately weaponising starvation as a tool of genocide – and that the impact of this period will last for generations.
Our field researchers in Gaza documented some of the earliest cases of child starvation in early 2024 and continued collecting evidence well into Israel’s latest closure of the Gaza Strip.
We argue that Israel unleashed famine in Gaza in early 2024, when the first child died of starvation, and that it has not ended since.
Genocidal intent
A famine does not simply occur by chance. Israeli authorities have deliberately manufactured famine in Gaza by implementing attacks and policies that prevent basic essentials from reaching Palestinians in need.
While Israel’s supporters have denied this, Israeli officials made their intentions clear in the early days of the genocide.
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Who can forget what then-Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October 2023?
Among the earliest and most striking examples of genocidal intent to starve Palestinians in Gaza, he said: “We are imposing a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
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The siege that followed never ended. Palestinian children are dying, one after another, from prolonged malnutrition and dehydration, which shut down their bodies slowly and painfully.
Young children, newborn babies, and children with disabilities or chronic conditions are among the most vulnerable to malnutrition and dehydration, wrote the Doctors Against Genocide medical team in one section of DCIP’s latest report.
Children who experience prolonged malnutrition at a young age typically grow up stunted, with weak immune systems, and are more likely to develop chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.
They experience academic and behavioural problems in school and face long-term issues with attention, learning and executive functioning.
DCIP’s field researchers documented 33 cases of child starvation for our report, but this represents only a fraction of the true toll of malnutrition in Gaza. The scale of the genocide – and the risks facing our field researchers – make it impossible to document every case.
Global complicity
Right now, every child in Gaza is facing starvation. Israeli authorities are not the only ones responsible for this suffering.
World leaders – who have watched Israeli officials lay out plans to starve Palestinians, drop 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings, shoot children and families sheltering in schools, and attack every hospital in Gaza – are complicit and must be held accountable.
This report’s findings could not be more urgent. What line could be more red than a starving baby, wasting away before his mother’s eyes?
World leaders who watch as Israel starves and bombs Palestinian families are complicit and must be held accountable
It is too late for Hasan, who should have celebrated his third birthday last week and instead succumbed to starvation while his mother watched helplessly.
It is too late for all the other Palestinian children who have died a slow, painful death as their muscles wasted away and their organs failed from a lack of food and water.
It is not too late for the one million hungry children still in Gaza, waiting for a day when they have enough to eat.
We are calling for an immediate and decisive end to Israel’s siege and genocide in Gaza – and for world leaders to take every action necessary to save the lives of Palestinian children and families. Anything short of that is simply not enough.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
