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9-year-old Ratib Mahmoud Abu Kulayk, who fled his village in northern Gaza with his family to Deir al Balah, lost his mother in an Israeli airstrike while visiting relatives in Khan Yunis as he continues to live under harsh conditions in Deir al Balah, Gaza on September 14, 2025. [Hassan Jedi – Anadolu Agency]
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Thursday that around 42,000 people in Gaza, a quarter of them children, are living with war-related injuries that have caused permanent disabilities and will require long-term medical care.
According to a WHO report, out of an estimated 167,376 people injured since October 2023, one in four has suffered lasting damage, including more than 5,000 amputations.
Other serious injuries reported include over 22,000 limb injuries, more than 2,000 spinal cord injuries, nearly 1,300 traumatic brain injuries, and over 3,300 severe burns.
These injuries need a “further increasing the need for specialized surgical and rehabilitation services and deeply affecting patients and their families across Gaza.,” the organisation said, noting that “One in four of these injuries are in children.”
WHO’s representative in the occupied Palestinian territory, Richard Peeperkorn, told a press conference: “Lifelong rehabilitation will be essential.”
Gaza’s already fragile health system has been pushed beyond its limits and is unable to cope with the overwhelming needs caused by the conflict. Only 14 out of 36 hospitals remain partially functioning, while rehabilitation services have been reduced to a third of their pre-war capacity.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Palestinians flee with their belongings amid Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood on August 12, 2025. (Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip,” said Oxfam International.
Israel’s US-backed campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza City has left nearly 1 million people—half of them starved by design—with nowhere to seek refuge, United Nations agencies and other humanitarian groups warned Wednesday.
“We are witnessing a dangerous escalation in Gaza City, where Israeli forces have stepped up their operations and ordered everyone to move south. This comes two weeks after famine was confirmed in the city and surrounding areas,” said the UN Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), a strategic forum of UN agency heads and over 200 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
“While Israeli authorities have unilaterally declared an area in the south as ‘humanitarian,’ it has not taken effective steps to ensure the safety of those forced to move there and neither the size nor scale of services provided is fit to support those already there, let alone new arrivals,” HCT continued.
“Nearly 1 million people are now left with no safe or viable options—neither the north nor the south offers safety,” HCT added.
With no safe place left in #Gaza, UN and NGOs call for a ceasefire and protection from forced displacement.
One elderly woman caring for an injured 8-year-old girl who is one of tens of thousands of children orphaned by Israeli attacks toldAmnesty International Wednesday that “she’s all that I have left, and I have tried everything I can to protect her.”
“We have been displaced twice just in the last week,” the woman added. “We don’t have the means to go to the south, and we are tired of being forced to relive this ordeal all over again.”
An elderly disabled woman living in a makeshift refugee camp in southern Gaza City told Amnesty that “we were displaced from Sheikh Radwan three weeks ago; my son had to carry me on his shoulders because I have no wheelchair and no transportation could reach our area.”
“Now we are ordered to evacuate again. Where do we go?” she asked. “To secure transportation to the south, you have to pay close to 4,000 shekels ($1,200) and to buy a tent, you have to pay at least 3,000 shekels and we don’t know if we’ll find any land to pitch our tent on.”
“We had already spent all our savings to survive this war, looking for food and basics,” the woman added. “Every day is like the war is starting all over again, only far worse, but we are totally depleted, we have no will or strength to carry on.”
Photos showing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—including some with donkey-drawn carts—slowly streaming southward from Gaza City evoked images from the Nakba, when more than 750,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Palestine by Zionist terror militias during the establishment of modern Israel.
More than 200,000 Palestinians displaced from Gaza City amid escalating Israeli air strikes and humanitarian crises in besieged areas — in pictures https://t.co/uH1p22Ln61pic.twitter.com/PMcmVIBHs8
The World Health Organization (WHO), a UN body, warned Wednesday that “starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at the highest levels ever since the conflict began almost two years ago,” and that “deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.”
“After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death,” the agency added. “Another 1.07 million people (54%) are in ‘emergency’ (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20%) are in ‘crisis’ (IPC Phase 3).”
WHO also cited overall casualties in Gaza—now approaching at least 65,000 deaths, mostly women and children—and 164,000 injuries, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM)—and noted that “as of September 5, 2025, there have been 2,339 reported fatalities among aid-seekers near militarized distribution sites and along convoy routes since May 27.”
Oxfam International—a coalition of over 20 independent NGOs focused on alleviating poverty—echoed the UN experts, asserting that “Israel’s intent to displace around 1 million civilians, half of whom are living in famine, is impossible and illegal.”
“Displacement orders, on leaflets thrown from the sky, or posted on social media, signal grave next steps, a scene all too familiar in Gaza where every order has preceded new waves of destruction and mass casualties,” Oxfam said. “This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip, where nothing and no one has been spared.”
Heba Morayef, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said Wednesday that Israel’s mass displacement order for Gaza City residents “is cruel, unlawful, and further compounds the genocidal conditions of life that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians.”
“Gaza City… is now facing complete obliteration,” Morayef added. “It is evident that Israel is determined in pursuing its goal to physically destroy Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It is unconscionable that states with leverage over Israel continue to provide it with arms and diplomatic support to destroy Palestinian lives.”
Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2—Israel’s plan to ”conquer, cleanse, and stay” in Gaza and “annihilate everything” there—as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently put it—has ramped up in recent days, with intensified Israeli air and artillery strikes and ground troops pushing deeper into Gaza City.
According to GHM, at least 72 Palestinians were killed and a minimum of 356 others were wounded by Israeli forces across Gaza on Thursday, including children and infants. At least 53 of the victims were killed in Gaza City. Israeli strikes reportedly targeted homes, tents housing refugees, and aid distribution points.
Additionally, GHM said that seven Palestinians including a child died from starvation over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of famine-related deaths in Gaza to at least 411, 142 of them children.
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Palestinians struggling with hunger flock to an aid distribution point near the Zikim Crossing in northwestern Gaza to access limited aid supplies amid Israeli attacks in Gaza Strip on August 8, 2025. [Saeed M. M. T. Jaras – Anadolu Agency]
UN agencies on Friday warned that famine is already claiming lives in Gaza and urged immediate humanitarian access and a ceasefire, stressing that children are at acute risk of starvation, Anadolu reports.
The joint statement of The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF and World Health Organization (WHO) came following the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s (IPC) declaration of famine in Gaza Governorate, one of the five regions of the Gaza Strip, where Israel has killed nearly 62,200 Palestinians since October 2023.
The global hunger monitor also projected that famine will spread to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis within weeks.
FAO said people in Gaza have run out of survival options, with hunger and malnutrition now killing daily, and the destruction of cropland, livestock, fisheries, and other food systems worsening the crisis.
“Our priority must now be safe and sustained access for large-scale food assistance,” FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu Qu said, adding that access to food is “not a privilege – it is a basic human right.”
The WFP, for its part, noted that famine warnings had been clear for months.
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said what is needed now is a surge of aid, safer conditions on the ground, and effective distribution networks to reach everyone in need.
Full humanitarian access and a ceasefire now are critical to save lives,” she added.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said: “As we have repeatedly warned, the signs were unmistakable: children with wasted bodies, too weak to cry or eat; babies dying from hunger and preventable disease; parents arriving at clinics with nothing left to feed their children.”
“There is no time to lose,” she said, warning that without an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian access, famine will spread and more children will die. Russell added that children on the brink of starvation need the therapeutic feeding that UNICEF provides.
For his part, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called a ceasefire “an absolute and moral imperative,” saying the world had waited too long while tragic and unnecessary deaths mounted from what he described as a “man-made famine.”
He warned that widespread malnutrition is making even common illnesses fatal, especially for children, and that Gaza’s health system, run by “hungry and exhausted health workers,” is unable to cope.
“Gaza must be urgently supplied with food and medicines to save lives and begin the process of reversing malnutrition,” he said, stressing that hospitals must be protected, aid blockages must end, and “peace must be restored, so that healing can begin.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Intensified Israeli attacks have devastated hospitals and healthcare in Gaza, with patients left to suffer amid a blockade of medical resources and repeated denials of evacuation permits
Conditions in Gaza’s healthcare system, already critical, have further deteriorated under Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) attacks on hospitals in the north. Following the forced closure of the Indonesian Hospital, only two hospitals, Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan, remain partially functional. Al-Awda is difficult to access due to damaged road infrastructure, while Kamal Adwan endured a violent raid on October 25-26.
Both have in their care more patients than they can objectively provide care to. During the raid on Kamal Adwan, Israeli soldiers detained or disappeared 44 male staff members, with dozens still imprisoned. According to the UN, by October 29 only two doctors – the hospital director and a pediatrician – remained at Kamal Adwan to manage care for 150 patients without surgical, anesthesiology, or intensive care support. Despite appeals, Israel continues to block access for additional medical teams, supplies, and life-saving essentials.
Medical evacuations remain practically non-existent. Since May, only 127 children have been permitted to leave Gaza for critical care. Thousands more injured children face indefinite waits for permits. UNICEF recently expressed what can only be described as desperation, calling out Israel’s bureaucratic “indifference” that leaves children suffering without relief or hope. And, while it is possible to know how few children were allowed to leave Gaza for medical care, Israel does not keep records of how many were denied. “When a patient is denied, there is nothing that can be done,” the agency said. “Trapped in the grip of an indifferent bureaucracy, children’s pain is brutally compounded.”
The situation is far beyond agony for children like Elia, a four-year-old girl who suffered severe burns and multiple amputations after an Israeli rocket attack. Hospitalized for over 40 days, she was admitted along with her mother, Eslam, who sustained similar injuries. Eslam died as a result of the attack in which she and her daughter were hurt, and only then was Elia granted medical evacuation, but without a clear timeline.
Children including infants with cancer and malnutrition, as well as 12-year-olds in need of bone surgery, have been repeatedly denied the right to be transferred to a place where they can access adequate care. “No treatment, no pain relief, no escape,” Elder said of the situation.
There are no healthy people left in the Gaza Strip: those not suffering physical injury are either going hungry or struggling with mental health effects of trauma. Respiratory diseases, jaundice, and diarrhea are rampant due to destroyed sanitation infrastructure and chronic malnutrition. Without an immediate and lasting ceasefire, conditions are expected to worsen further.
Concerns include missing the thresholds set for the polio vaccination campaign, after the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners were forced to suspend the final phase of a polio vaccination campaign in northern Gaza due to escalating IOF violence. While WHO has expressed hopes to resume vaccinations from November 2 to 4, it remains to be seen if Israeli authorities will guarantee the necessary safety assurances.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
