Almost one in six children suffers from acute malnutrition in Gaza due to the war between Israel and Hamas, estimates a study published this Thursday, October 9, while the UN recently declared that the Palestinian territory was plagued by famine.
“After almost two years of conflict and drastic restrictions on humanitarian aid, tens of thousands of children in the Gaza Strip suffer from avoidable acute malnutrition, increasing their risk of mortality,” concludes this study published in The Lancet and funded by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
This publication comes almost two months after the UN officially declared famine this summer in certain areas of the Palestinian territory, an accusation rejected as false by Israel.
The conflict was triggered by a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,219 people, mostly civilians, on Israeli soil. Since then, more than 67,160 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip in the Israeli retaliation campaign, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, under the authority of Hamas and whose figures the UN considers reliable.
Almost 55,000 children suffer from malnutrition
The study, the first to so comprehensively establish the extent of malnutrition among children in Gaza, is based on data from more than 200,000 children under five years of age examined between January 2024 and August 2025 at UNRWA clinics and emergency sites.
The rate of acute malnutrition, which causes sudden weight loss and can cause serious short- and long-term health problems, has increased, especially after the blockade imposed by Israel between March and May 2025.
The latest measurements, taken in August, show that 15% of the children examined were suffering from acute malnutrition. Extrapolating to the entire population of Gaza, researchers estimate that nearly 55,000 children are affected in the territory.
“These data must be considered with certain limitations in mind,” international pediatricians who were not involved in the study warned in a commentary published in The Lancet.
But these findings, of rare quality for a war zone, clearly indicate that “children in the Gaza Strip are severely malnourished, a reality that will affect their future health and development for several generations.”
Furthermore, noting that the conflict in Gaza is the subject of special media attention, they recall that other war zones are affected by famine, especially in Sudan.
Source: BFM TV
