From the Liveblog of
Saturday, March 9, 2024
NYT highlights emaciated 10-year-old boy as ‘face of starvation in Gaza’
The New York Times publishes an article highlighting 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, who died in a Rafah hospital on Monday, calling him “the face of starvation in Gaza.”
Photos of Kafarneh, who suffered from cerebral palsy and required a special diet to survive, circulated on social media in recent weeks amid UN estimates that hundreds of thousands of Gazans are close to starvation.
“Yazan’s parents had struggled for months to care for their son, whose condition, experts say, would have meant he had trouble swallowing and needed a soft, high-nutrition diet,” the Times report says, noting that the family had fled their home in northern Gaza and moved repeatedly to seek shelter since the war erupted. “Day after day, I saw my son getting weaker,” Shareef Kafarneh, Yazan’s taxi driver father tells the paper.
“Eventually, they ended up in Al-Awda [Hospital], in the southern city of Rafah, where Yazan died on Monday morning,” the report says. Dr. Jabr al-Shaer, a pediatrician who treated him, cites malnutrition and a respiratory infection, and says the lack of food had weakened his frail immune system.
“It’s often that a child is extremely malnourished, and then they get sick and that virus is ultimately what causes that death,” a malnutrition expert is quoted as saying in the article. “But they would not have died if they were not malnourished.”
The report also cites health officials in Hamas-run Gaza as saying that 20 Palestinian children have died from malnutrition and dehydration since the war began on October 7, sparked by Hamas’s brutal onslaught on southern Israel.
In January, Col. Moshe Tetro, head of COGAT’s Coordination and Liaison Administration to Gaza, said that contrary to UN reports that detail widespread starvation, “there is no food shortage in Gaza.”
Israel, which checks all humanitarian aid trucks entering Gaza from both the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings, has blamed the UN for not delivering supplies fast enough after they are cleared, and for leading to a general fall-off in deliveries over the past month.
