Child No. 87… Who’s Next?

NYN| Reports and Analyses 

The face of little “Zainab” was nothing but bones wrapped in pale skin.

On Saturday morning, her father carried her in his arms to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, after her mother had failed to convince her to swallow a few drops of sugar-dissolved water—the family’s only “meal” for the day.

In the emergency room, doctors could do nothing. Zainab’s breath fell silent forever. She was not yet three years old.

In the next bed, a 38-year-old woman struggled to breathe through the pain of an empty stomach. Her heart stopped before the IV fluids reached her. She died, leaving behind four children still waiting for a piece of bread that never came.

This is how time passes in Gaza now: a silent death—without blood, without explosions—but more lethal than bombs.

In just 24 hours, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported the deaths of six civilians due to starvation and malnutrition. Among the victims: two children, a woman in her late thirties, and two men in their forties—all of them gone because food had become an “impossible wish.”

Four-year-old Suhail can no longer stand.

His mother weeps silently as she watches him being shown to doctors who can offer no real treatment.

One doctor told her, “All we need is one bag of baby formula—but it’s been unavailable in Gaza for weeks.”

According to the Ministry of Health, 133 people have died of hunger in Gaza as a result of the Israeli siege and ongoing aggression—87 of them are children.

With every moment of delay in aid delivery, Gaza inches closer to a silent massacre, threatening the lives of over 100,000 children, according to Doctors Without Borders, who warn that 1 in 4 children in Gaza is now suffering from severe malnutrition.

“Death here is not swift,” says one doctor. “It walks slowly through the bellies of children, hides in the faces of mothers, and takes lives from us every hour.”

Gaza today is not just a battlefield where Israel commits its crimes—it has become a graveyard for humanity’s silence.