“Mama Is Coming Back”: The Unbearable Reality of Gaza’s Forgotten Children

Six-year-old Yazan sits on a torn piece of foam on the floor of a refugee camp in Gaza City.

His eyes are wide open. His body is thin — painfully, visibly thin. His arms look like fragile twigs. He does not cry. He does not ask for food. He has long passed the stage where hunger hurts. Now, it just numbs.

His mother, Naima, watches him from a few feet away. She has not had flour or any food in their home for two months. She has nothing left to give him.

“I look at my son,” she says quietly, “and I feel like I am watching him disappear.”

Yazan is two years old. He weighs less than a healthy newborn.

And Yazan is not alone.

A Generation Being Erased

Across the Gaza Strip, hundreds of thousands of children are living through what United Nations officials are now calling one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes ever recorded for children anywhere on Earth.

The numbers are almost impossible to comprehend — until you attach a human face to them.

According to UNICEF, more than 64,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza since the conflict began. That is not a typo. Sixty-four thousand children — enough to fill a large football stadium — killed or wounded.

More than 56,000 children have lost one or both parents. They are orphans now, wandering through rubble, living in tents, surviving on whatever scraps they can find.

Every single day, children in Gaza wake up without knowing if they will eat. Without knowing if they will be alive by nightfall.

This is not a natural disaster. This is not a famine caused by drought or flood.

This is a man-made catastrophe — and the world has been watching it happen in slow motion.

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The Hunger That Kills Silently

Of all the horrors unfolding in Gaza, perhaps none is more devastating — or more preventable — than the hunger.

In 2023, when the conflict first began, only four deaths were officially attributed to starvation. By 2024, that number rose to 49. Then came 2025 — and the death toll from starvation alone exploded to 422 in a single year. That is a 760 percent increase in starvation deaths in just twelve months, according to data reported by Al Jazeera.

Let that sink in. In one year, starvation deaths increased by 760 percent.

By mid-2025, the United Nations confirmed what humanitarian workers on the ground had been screaming for months: Gaza was officially in famine.

According to a joint statement from FAO, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, more than half a million people were trapped in famine conditions — with widespread starvation, destitution and preventable deaths confirmed across the Strip.

The hunger has hit children hardest of all.

In Gaza City alone, malnutrition levels among children under five quadrupled in just two months, reaching 16.5 percent. In July 2025, more than 12,000 children were identified as acutely malnourished in a single month — the highest figure ever recorded, and a six-fold increase since the beginning of the year.

Nearly one in four of those children was suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition — the deadliest form of undernutrition, the kind that permanently damages a child’s brain and organs, the kind that kills.

By mid-2026, UN projections warn that 43,400 children will be at severe risk of death from malnutrition — triple the number projected just months earlier.

One in five babies in Gaza is now born prematurely or underweight.

They arrive into the world already fighting for their lives.

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“Children With Bodies Too Weak to Cry”

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell described what her staff witnessed on the ground in words that are difficult to read — and impossible to forget.

“The signs were unmistakable,” she said. “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.”

Imagine that for a moment.

A parent — a mother or father — carrying their child to a clinic. Not because of a fever. Not because of a broken bone. But because their child has not eaten enough food to survive. And they have nothing — nothing — left to give.

Save the Children, one of the leading humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza, issued a stark warning: four out of every five children in Gaza will enter 2026 still facing crisis levels of hunger. That is approximately 800,000 children — nearly a million young lives — waking up every single morning not knowing if they will have food that day.

The organization also highlighted a deeply troubling detail: even when food does enter Gaza, it is largely bread and processed foods high in sugar and salt. Dairy products, eggs, meat, fish, fresh fruits and vegetables are largely unavailable in markets.

Children are not just starving. They are malnourished in ways that will damage them for the rest of their lives — damaging their brains, their immune systems, their ability to grow, learn and develop.

A generation is being permanently harmed.

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The Hospitals That Cannot Help

When a child collapses from hunger in Gaza, where do they go?

The hospitals — what is left of them — are overwhelmed beyond anything they were designed to handle.

According to UNICEF, intense bombardment and the widespread destruction of medical infrastructure have left most children without access to even the most basic healthcare. Routine immunization has been interrupted. Maternal and newborn services have been severely disrupted. Preventable diseases are rising rapidly across the Strip.

The four specialized malnutrition treatment centers that remain open in Gaza are all working beyond capacity. They are running low on fuel. Health workers are exhausted. Water and sanitation systems have broken down, accelerating the spread of disease and creating a deadly cycle: hunger weakens the immune system, disease spreads faster, children die from illnesses that would be easily treated in any other part of the world.

Of the 74 malnutrition-related deaths recorded in one month in 2025, according to WHO, 63 occurred in a single month — July. Among them were 24 children under five years old. Most of them were declared dead on arrival at health facilities — their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting.

They did not die in battle. They did not die from bombs.

They died because they had nothing to eat.

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The Children Who Have Lost Everything

Beyond hunger and injury, there is another wound that does not show up in medical statistics — but will shape an entire generation for decades to come.

Trauma.

According to UNICEF, the extreme scale of trauma in Gaza is driving urgent mental health needs among children that the humanitarian system is entirely unequipped to address. Children have witnessed the deaths of parents, siblings, neighbors. They have watched their homes be destroyed. They have been displaced — many of them multiple times — forced to flee with nothing, sleeping in tents, on rubble, in bombed-out buildings.

More than 56,000 children have lost one or both parents. These children are not just grieving. Many of them are now the primary caregivers for younger siblings. Ten-year-olds caring for five-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds trying to find food for babies.

Schools — those that have not been destroyed — have been converted into shelters for displaced families. Hundreds of thousands of children have had their education completely interrupted, potentially setting them back years. The systematic attacks on schools, according to UNICEF, have severely hampered any resumption of learning.

A child who was six years old when the conflict began is now eight or nine. They have spent nearly half their entire life in war.

They have never known anything else.

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The World Watches. The Numbers Keep Rising.

In December 2025, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged that famine had been “pushed back” following the ceasefire — but issued a sharp warning that the situation remains “fragile — perilously so.”

According to UN projections, through mid-April 2026, approximately 571,000 people will remain in emergency hunger conditions, while around 1,900 people are still expected to face catastrophe-level hunger — the most extreme classification that exists.

The ceasefire has allowed some aid to flow. Communal kitchens have been set up. More than 100,000 tents have entered Gaza. Limited food supplies have trickled in.

But aid workers and UN officials are clear: it is not enough.

More than 62,000 tons of life-saving aid is required every month just to cover basic food and nutrition needs in Gaza. The infrastructure — water systems, sanitation, hospitals, roads — remains decimated. Without rebuilding these systems, every child in Gaza remains at risk.

And in the worst-case scenario — if hostilities resume, or if humanitarian and commercial inflows are halted — the entire Gaza Strip could once again face full-scale famine.

The UN warns this scenario is not hypothetical.

It is a real and present danger.

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Yazan’s Story Does Not End Here

Remember Yazan — the two-year-old boy on the torn piece of foam, his mother watching him disappear?

UNICEF documented his story as part of their ongoing work in Gaza. Workers from nutrition sites have been attempting to reach children like Yazan with therapeutic feeding programs — specially formulated foods designed to rescue children from the edge of starvation.

But aid delivery is inconsistent. Nutrition sites have been forced to relocate during military escalations. Workers have lost contact with communities. Children enrolled in malnutrition treatment have been unable to complete their care.

In the medical world, there is a term for what happens when a child’s body is starved for too long: stunting. The child’s growth — physical and cognitive — is permanently impaired. Even if Yazan survives. Even if food eventually reaches him. Even if the war ends tomorrow.

The damage may already be done.

This is not a statistic. This is a child — a real, living, breathing child — whose entire future has been shaped by decisions made by powerful people in distant rooms.

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What the World Must Do — And Has Not Done

The humanitarian organizations on the ground in Gaza are not asking for the impossible.

They are asking for food. For medicine. For water. For fuel to run the generators that keep incubators alive in neonatal units. For safe passage so that aid trucks can reach the communities that need them most.

WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain stated plainly: “We need to flood Gaza with large-scale food aid, immediately and without obstruction, and keep it flowing each and every day to prevent mass starvation.”

FAO Director-General QU Dongyu was equally direct: “People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked.”

The UN Secretary-General has called for more crossings into Gaza, fewer restrictions on critical supplies, safe routes within the Strip, sustained funding and unimpeded humanitarian access.

These calls have been made. They have been heard. And yet the hunger continues.

And children like Yazan continue to disappear.

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The Question the World Must Answer

At some point — when the history of this period is written, when scholars and journalists and ordinary people look back at what happened in Gaza in the 2020s — there will be a question that demands an answer.

Not a political question. Not a legal question.

A human question.

We knew. We had the data. We had the images. We had the testimonies of mothers holding their wasting children. We had the reports from UNICEF, WHO, WFP, Save the Children, the UN Secretary-General himself.

We knew — and what did we do?

Every 35 minutes, a child is born into hunger in Gaza. That is what Save the Children tells us. Every 35 minutes, a new life enters the world already facing crisis.

Somewhere in Gaza right now, there is a child saving half their bread for someone who is not coming back.

Somewhere, there is a mother who has nothing left to give.

And somewhere, there is the rest of the world – watching.