What It Feels Like When You Die from Hunger: Gaza’s Starvation Crisis in Slow Motion

by Dissident Voice Communications / July 18th, 2025

Quds News Network

In Gaza’s emergency rooms, doctors now face a wave of patients suffering not from injury, but from hunger. The Ministry of Health confirmed that unprecedented numbers of people, from infants to the elderly, are arriving at hospitals in extreme exhaustion due to starvation.

The cause is not a drought or a natural disaster. It is the direct result of Israel’s full blockade, now in its 139th consecutive day. And the death toll is rising.

So far, 69 children have died from malnutrition. Another 620 patients have died due to the lack of food and medicine. Behind every number is a slow, painful process that strips the human body of life one stage at a time.

The Body’s Breakdown: A Four-Stage Collapse

Stage One: The Hunger Takes Over
In the first 48 hours without food, your body uses up its stored sugar (glycogen) from the liver and muscles. Hunger pangs hit hard. You feel anxious, irritable, and dizzy. Your stomach cramps. You may struggle to focus. Energy vanishes quickly, and even walking becomes a task. Children scream in discomfort or go silent from exhaustion.

Stage Two: Muscle Melts, Immunity Crumbles
After a few days, your body switches to survival mode. It starts breaking down fat into ketones for fuel. But when fat runs low, your muscles become the next target. You begin to lose strength. Your immune system weakens. Small infections grow dangerous. You feel cold, even when it’s hot. Simple tasks like standing or thinking become harder.

Stage Three: Your Organs Struggle to Keep Up
Now weeks in, your body is wasting away. You look skeletal. Your skin turns dry and brittle. Some parts of your body, like your belly or feet, may swell due to protein loss. Your heart rate drops. Your liver and kidneys slow down. Your mind becomes foggy. You may forget where you are. Some start hallucinating. You no longer recognize your own voice or the people around you.

Stage Four: The Final Shutdown
Eventually, your body gives up. You no longer feel hunger. Swallowing becomes impossible. You might fall unconscious or slip into a coma. Your organs (heart, lungs, liver) begin to fail. Death often comes quietly, not from hunger itself, but from a final, irreversible shutdown.

The Gaza Numbers That Should Alarm the World

In addition to the rising death toll, the Government Media Office in Gaza released staggering figures today:

• 650,000 children are now at risk of dying from hunger and malnutrition.

• 76,450 aid and fuel trucks have been blocked from entering Gaza in the past 139 days.

• 42 charity kitchens and 57 aid centers have been directly targeted by Israeli forces.

• 877 people have been killed near American-Israeli “aid centers.”

• 12,500 cancer patients and 60,000 pregnant women are also facing starvation without access to treatment or food.

A Man-Made Famine, a Global Failure

Starvation is not just physical. It destroys dignity, memory, and hope. In Gaza, it comes with the added trauma of displacement, bombardment, and abandonment by the international community.

“This is not just a humanitarian crisis,” the Government Media Office stated. “It is a deliberate policy. And the governments who support Israel or remain silent are complicit.”

The office called for immediate global action: opening the crossings, lifting the siege, and allowing unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza before more lives are lost.

But as of today, the siege remains. And every passing hour brings Gaza closer to a famine that the world could stop, but hasn’t.

Dissident Voice Communications (DVC) is a non-profit meta-company in the public interest (well, depends on which public), we aim to challenge the hegemony of Big Media by communicating... all sorts of stuff. Read other articles by Dissident Voice Communications.

Making Concentration Camp Gaza Inbox

Ominous Plans

by Binoy Kampmark / July 18th, 2025


The odious idea of a camp within a camp. The Gaza Strip, with an even greater concentration of Palestinian civilian life within an ever-shrinking stretch of territory. These are the proposals ventured by the Israeli government even as the official Palestinian death toll marches upwards to 60,000. They envisage the placement of some 600,000 displaced and houseless beings currently living in tents in the area of al-Mawasi along Gaza’s southern coast in a creepily termed “humanitarian city”. This would be the prelude for an ultimate relocation of the strip’s entire population of over 2 million in an area that will become an even smaller prison than the Strip already is.

The preparation for such a forced removal – yet another among so many Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians – is in full swing. The analysis of satellite imagery from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) by Al Jazeera’s Sanad investigations unit found that approximately 12,800 buildings were demolished in Rafah between early April and early July alone. In the Knesset on May 11 this year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave words to those deeds: “We are demolishing more and more [of their] homes, they have nowhere to return to. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”

Camps of concentrated human life – concentration camps, in other words – are often given a different dressing to what they are meant to be. Authoritarian states enjoy using them to re-educate and reform the inmates even as they gradually kill them. Indeed, the proposals from the Israel’s Defense Department carry with them plans for a “Humanitarian Transit Area” where Gazans would “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate, and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so”.

The emetic candy floss of “humanitarian” in the context of a camp is a self-negating nonsense similar to other experiments in cruelty: the relocation of Boer civilians during the colonial wars waged by Britain to camps which saw dysentery and starvation; the movement of Vietnamese villagers into fortified hamlets to prevent their infiltration by the Vietcong in the 1960s; the creation of Pacific concentration camps to detain refugees seeking Australia by boat in what came to be called the “Pacific Solution”.

Those in the business of doing humanitarian deeds were understandably appalled by Israel’s latest plans. Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), stated that this would “de facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations”. It would certainly “deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland.” Self-evidently and sadly, that would be one of the main aims.

A few of Israeli’s former Prime Ministers have ditched the coloured goggles in considering the plans for such a mislabelled city. Yair Lapid, who spent a mere six months in office in 2022, told Israeli Army Radio that it was “a bad idea from every possible perspective – security, political, economic, logistical”. While preferring not to use the term “concentration camp” with regards such a construction, incarcerating individuals by effectively preventing their exit would make such a term appropriate.

Ehud Olmert’s words to The Guardian were even less inclined to varnish the matter. “If they [the Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing”. To create a camp that would effectively “clean” more than half of Gaza of its population could hardly be understood as a plan to save Palestinians. “It is to deport them, to push and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have at least.”

Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg was also full of candour in expressing the view that the plan was “for all facts and purposes a concentration camp” for Gaza’s Palestinians, “an overt crime against humanity under international humanitarian law”. This would also add the burgeoning grounds of illegality already being alleged in this month’s petition by three Israeli reserve soldiers of Israel’s Supreme Court questioning the legality of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Instancing abundant examples of forced transfer and expulsions of the Palestinian population during its various phases, commentators such as former chief of staff of the IDF, Moshe “Bogy” Ya’alon, are unreserved about how such programs fare before international law. “Evacuating an entire population? Call it ethnic cleansing, call it transfer, call it deportation, it’s a war crime,” he told journalist Lucy Aharish. “Israel’s soldiers had been sent in “to commit war crimes.”

There is also some resistance from within the IDF, less on humanitarian grounds than practical ones. To even prepare such a plan in the midst of negotiations for a lasting ceasefire and finally resolving the hostage situation was the first telling problem. The other was how the IDF could feasibly undertake what would be a grand jailing experiment while preventing the infiltration of Hamas.

This ghastly push by the Netanyahu government involves an enormous amount of wishful thinking. Ideally, the Palestinians will simply leave. If not, they will live in even more carceral conditions than they faced before October 2023. But to assume that this cartoon strip humanitarianism, papered over a ghoulish program of inflicted suffering, will add to the emptying well of Israeli security, is testament to how utterly desperate, and delusionary, the Israeli PM and his cabinet members have become.  

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

British Surgeon in Gaza Reports ‘Unprecedented Malnutrition,’ Says IDF Snipers Targeting Aid Seekers

Nick Maynard said Israeli snipers are targeting 'certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals'

by Dave DeCamp | Jul 17, 2025

Nick Maynard, a British surgeon currently working at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, has told The Telegraph that Palestinians in the besieged enclave are facing “unprecedented malnutrition” due to the Israeli blockade and that Israeli snipers are targeting people seeking food near aid distribution sites.

Maynard said that the aid sites run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) were “death traps” and that IDF snipers were targeting “certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs, or genitals.” Nearly 900 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces since the GHF began operating in Gaza.

The British surgeon said that he had operated on many young teenage boys who were wounded near aid sites. “A twelve-year-old boy I was operating on died from his injuries on the operating table – he had been shot through the chest,” he said.

Palestinian mother Israa Abu Haleeb looks after her five-month-old daughter, Zainab, who is diagnosed with malnutrition, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on July 15, 2025. REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri

Maynard said that severe malnutrition has been contributing to preventable deaths among Palestinians receiving surgery. “The malnutrition I’m seeing here is indescribably bad. It’s much, much worse now than a year ago,” he said.

“The repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, and they die. I have never had so many patients die because they can’t get enough food to recover,” he added.

Babies have been starving to death in Gaza due to Israeli restrictions on baby formula, as malnourished mothers cannot produce breast milk. Maynard said that the Nasser Hospital is also running out of intravenous liquid fluids used to treat severely malnourished children and that four infants died of malnutrition at the hospital last week.

“I saw a seven-month-old who looked like a newborn. The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice,” Maynard said.

The British surgeon also volunteered in Gaza last year and said his visit to the besieged enclave was the worst thing he had ever experienced. “It was much worse than we could possibly have imagined. I couldn’t compare it to anything, it was just like nothing I’ve seen on Earth,” he said at the time.

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.