Starving Palestinian Boy Whose Photos Reflected Gaza Famine Dies

Yazan al-Kafarneh, a Palestinian boy whose emaciated appearance offered the world a stark illustration of Gaza’s accelerating starvation crisis, has become one of the latest children in the territory to die of severe malnourishment.

Yazan was receiving medical treatment with the few resources available at Abu Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are trying to survive without adequate shelter or food.

Graphic photos taken on Feb. 28 and March 2, which appear below, show Yazan emaciated and bedridden while covered in blankets and receiving fluids intravenously. The photos were reposted online by activists, journalists and pro-Palestinian accounts, showing the reality of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza born out of Israel’s ongoing offensive and monthslong blockade of aid deliveries.

Yazan died of malnourishment on Monday, Al Jazeera reported. He was 10.

“This child had turned into a skeleton in this war before he died,” Muhammed al-Kafarneh, a relative of Yazan, told Al Jazeera in a video interview on Monday, as Yazan’s body was being cleaned and prepared for burial in the background.

“Hunger ravaged his body. This child was suffering from several diseases,” al-Kafarneh said. “The war came and took away all the basic components that could give him life.”

Yazan’s family was originally living in north Gaza ― which is facing its own starvation crisis ― before Israeli strikes displaced them several times. In a video on Instagram, Yazan’s father, sitting beside his emaciated son, shared a photo, taken a week before Israel began its offensive, of Yazan smiling and not visibly malnourished.

Hoping to find better health care for Yazan, who had cerebral palsy, the family arrived in Rafah. But despite his efforts, Yazan’s father could not locate the food, water or medicine his son needed to survive.

“We found nothing, so he was met with a slow and painful death,” Muhammed al-Kafarneh told Al Jazeera. “The barbaric war and the oppressive actions of the Israeli occupation against the children of Gaza and its civilians must be stopped.”

North Gaza itself is experiencing even less access to aid, with public order falling apart as Palestinians become desperate for food, water and other basic necessities. UNICEF said Sunday that at least 10 children have died due to dehydration and malnutrition in the north’s Kamal Adwan Hospital in recent days.

“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable,” Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

Malnutrition screenings conducted in the north by UNICEF and the World Food Program in January found that nearly 16% of children under 2 years of age were acutely malnourished, while similar screenings in Rafah found 5% of children in the same age range experiencing malnutrition.

“The sense of helplessness and despair among parents and doctors in realizing that lifesaving aid, just a few kilometres away, is being kept out of reach, must be as unbearable, but worse still are the anguished cries of those babies slowly perishing under the world’s gaze,” Khodr said. “The lives of thousands more babies and children depend on urgent action being taken now.”

Following an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants, in which some 1,200 people were killed and roughly another 250 were taken hostage, Israel has barred entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies into Gaza, aside from a small amount of aid entering from the south. Some aid groups have said their deliveries are also being delayed due to Israeli forces firing at their trucks.

The U.S. airdropped dozens of food bundles over Gaza on Saturday, even as it continues to assist the country blocking the aid in the first place. The airdrop occurred two days after Israeli forces killed more than 100 Palestinians trying to access aid on the first major delivery to north Gaza in a month, resulting in widespread anger at the Israeli military and its biggest ally, the U.S. government.

Janti Soeripto, CEO of aid organization Save the Children, said Monday that “the conditions to provide humanitarian assistance to children in Gaza are not only not being met but are getting worse.”

“We have been calling for more crossings, more opening hours, more capacity to check trucks and pass them through, not have trucks be off and unloaded again four or five times,” Soeripto told NPR. “These are all fairly straightforward ways to make the logistics of this operation much easier, less painful and more effective. And none of these have been taken up so far.”

In addition to the airdrops, U.S. President Joe Biden said he wants to open a maritime corridor for aid “and expand deliveries by land.” A U.S. official told HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed on Sunday that aides anticipated incidents like the aid convoy shooting ― now widely being described as the “flour massacre” ― but that they still don’t expect Biden to pressure Israel in a way that actually helps Gazans.

“Pushing Israel to allow food in is totally off the table,” the official said, resulting in Biden’s pursuit of “low-yield PR stunts” like airdrops of aid and the idea of a maritime corridor.

“We direct our message to the international community and the free people of the world: What are you waiting for? At least guarantee the right to life for children,” Muhammed al-Kafarneh told Al Jazeera. “You claim to be just and righteous. What are you waiting for? We have reached famine. Not only that, but a complete catastrophe.”

GRAPHIC PHOTOS WARNING: The following highly distressing images depict death and severe malnourishment.