Gaza malnutrition to have ‘generational’ impact on newborns, UN warns

A senior UN official warns of “generational” impacts in Gaza from malnutrition among pregnant women and babies, urging a surge of aid to help prevent potential lifelong health issues.

“The sheer extent of the devastation looked like the set of a dystopian film,” Andrew Saberton, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), tells reporters after his visit to the war-torn enclave.

He says that a quarter of Gaza’s population is “starving.”

“That includes 11,500 pregnant women for whom starvation is particularly catastrophic for both mother and newborn,” says Saberton, whose agency leads reproductive and maternal health programs around the world.

As a result, 70 percent of newborns are premature or underweight, compared to 20 percent before Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel kicked off the war.

“Malnutrition will have generational effects, not on the mother, but on the newborn, likely to result in ever longer lasting care and problems throughout the life of the baby,” he says at UN headquarters in New York.

The recent ceasefire has allowed more freedom of movement for humanitarian workers, says Saberton, but only a “trickle of aid” is being allowed in, that is “nowhere near enough.”