LIVE UPDATES: Four children among 15 dead from forced starvation in Gaza in a day

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Here’s where things stand on Tuesday 22 July 2025:

• At least 15 people, including four children, have died due to famine and malnutrition in Gaza, the Health Ministry says, as Israel’s blockade of the Strip plunges it into an increasingly dire malnutrition crisis.
• Israeli forces have killed at least 51 Palestinians, including 14 aid seekers, in attacks across Gaza since dawn on Tuesday, a day after tanks pushed into southern and eastern parts of Deir el-Balah for the first time.
• UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini says doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers in Gaza are “fainting due to hunger and exhaustion”.
• The foreign ministers of 25 countries and a European Union commissioner have called for an immediate end to the war, saying suffering in Gaza has “reached new depths”.
• Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 59,029 people and wounded 142,135. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023 attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.

‘All options on the table’ if Israel does not deliver on Gaza pledges: EU’s Kallas

The European Union’s foreign policy chief has said “all options are on the table” if Israel does not deliver on its pledges to facilitate humanitarian aid in the Strip.

“The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible,” Kaja Kallas wrote in a social media post, adding she had spoken with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar “to recall our understanding on aid flow and made clear” that the Israeli army “must stop killing people at distribution points”.

Earlier this month, Kallas said Israel had agreed to expand humanitarian access to Gaza, including increasing the number of aid trucks, crossing points and routes to distribution hubs.

Israeli forces kill 51 people across Gaza since dawn

Medical sources have told Al Jazeera that at least 51 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces across Gaza since dawn today, including 14 aid seekers.

‘The world must act’ against the genocide: Spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence

Gaza’s Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basil has told Al Jazeera that he is on hunger strike to show the world that Palestinians in the besieged enclave “have the right to life”.

“Our children are starving to death. All we ask is for humanitarian aid to be delivered, without any restriction or conditions,” he said, adding that the Israel- and US-backed GHF has weaponised food, with aid seekers flocking to its sites and then leaving in body bags.

“The whole world must act, namely the human rights organisations … against the genocide unfolding against the unarmed civilian population in Gaza,” he pleaded, adding “the whole world must act, from scholars, preachers, parliamentarians; they all must act, they must stage, protest, sit-ins, even hunger strikes.

“The main purpose for me to go into a hunger strike is that I witness children dying from starvation. I see mothers unable to feed their children, doctors and nurses unable to cater for their patients.”

‘Nightmare’: UN warns of high risk for civilians after Israel’s Deir el-Balah push

The UN human rights chief has issued a new statement warning of further civilian killings, following Israel’s forced displacement threats for Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

“It seemed the nightmare couldn’t possibly get worse. And yet it does,” Volker Turk said.

“Given the concentration of civilians in the area, and the means and methods of warfare employed by Israel until now, the risks of unlawful killings and other serious violations of international humanitarian law are extremely high,” added the UN high commissioner for human rights.

His comments come a day after the Israeli army launched a ground operation in parts of the city this week, for the first time since the war started.

Photos: ‘Red line for Gaza’ protest in London

Israel targeting women in Gaza due to ‘reproductive capacity’: UN special rapporteur

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has told Al Jazeera that “all Palestinians, men, boys, girls and women are being subjected to this genocidal enterprise in a very sadistic, unprecedented and relentless manner, but within that … women and girls are deliberately being targeted by Israel because they are Palestinian and because of the reproductive capacity.

“Israel realises that … Palestinian women and girls carry the promise of the continuity of Palestinian life, and therefore they are being deliberately killed, and they’re being deliberately exterminated,” she said.

Alsalem has recently published a report on the topic, in which she says the actions taken by Israel in Gaza “are geared towards undermining the continuity of Palestinian life, to undermine Palestinian existence … to exterminate Palestinian life”.

“We see this through the increased rates of miscarriages among Palestinian women, the severe malnutrition… Even pregnant and lactating women are unable to breastfeed,” she said.

Baby formula has also been deliberately prevented from entering Gaza by Israel, which she says is reminiscent of the tactics used by Nazi Germany in the siege of Stalingrad during World War II.

It is a ‘moral duty’ to criticise Israel’s policies in Gaza, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem says

Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has criticised Israel’s war on Gaza following a visit to the Strip.

“We have nothing against the Jewish world, and we absolutely don’t want to appear to be against Israeli society and Judaism. But we have a moral duty to express our criticism of this government’s policies in Gaza with absolute clarity and frankness,” Pizzaballa told Vatican News.

His visit came after an Israeli tank hit Gaza’s sole Catholic church, killing three people and injuring 10. Israeli authorities said it was a “mistake”.

The Patriarch said he was struck by the vast expanses of tents he saw in the enclave where “people live in extremely precarious conditions” and by the mutilated children in hospitals.

Number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire rises

The number of people killed by Israeli forces across Gaza today has increased to at least 43, according to medical sources.

The grim figure includes at least 10 aid seekers, the sources told Al Jazeera.

‘Everyone in Gaza is hungry now’

The situation in Gaza for children and their families is “catastrophic”, according to Rachel Cummings, Save the Children’s humanitarian director.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, she said there has been no adequate food supply in Gaza for a very long time. The markets are empty and the water sanitation situation is not adequate to meet the needs of 2 million people, “who are all on the brink of famine”, she said.

She said in Deir el-Balah, she had seen “hungry people, children carrying empty bowls, looking for food, looking for water. It’s absolutely desperate here.

“We’re seeing an increased number of children in our clinics and our nutrition centres who are malnourished … We’re also seeing an increase in the number of pregnant women and breastfeeding women who are also malnourished,” she said, adding “everyone in Gaza is hungry now, and even in my team, I see visibly my team are thin, and also they cannot get food in the market.”

Time for a recap

If you’ve just joined us, here are the latest developments:

• Sources at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City have told Al Jazeera Arabic that the key medical facility’s dialysis department is now out of function due to fuel shortages amid the Israeli blockade.
• Israeli forces have killed at least 35 Palestinians across Gaza since dawn, including eight people seeking aid, medical sources have told Al Jazeera.
• One Israeli reservist soldier was killed in Gaza, the military has said.
• Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are reporting that a child from Khan Younis in the enclave’s south and a 40-day-old baby in the north of Gaza have died of malnutrition.
• The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says more than one million children in Gaza are going hungry as Israel has only allowed a trickle of food and humanitarian aid to enter the Strip since March.
• The World Health Organization’s staff residence in the southern city of Deir el-Balah was attacked three times by Israeli forces on Monday, Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said.

At least 15 people died from starvation in Gaza over the last 24 hours: Health Ministry

Hospitals in Gaza have recorded 15 deaths, including those of four children, in Gaza due to starvation and malnutrition over the past 24 hours amid Israel’s blockade on the Strip, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a statement.

That brings the total number of hunger-related deaths in the Strip to 101, including 80 children, since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023.

Photos: Israeli attacks continue across the Gaza Strip

Medical staff in Gaza working 24-hour shifts receive a single meal

Deirdre Nunan, a Canadian orthopaedic surgeon who is currently volunteering at Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, told Al Jazeera that some medical staff have to work 24-hour shifts in the besieged enclave.

“There is a single meal that’s provided in the mid-afternoon, and it’s a simple meal. Yesterday it was plain lentils; a couple of days ago, it was rice cooked with just a few pieces of corn in it, so it’s neither nutritionally complete, nor is it enough calories to sustain somebody who’s working for a full day,” she said.

“When I talk to my colleagues about what they’ve eaten before they come to work, invariably they say nothing; they just had water.”

She added: “One of my nurse colleagues yesterday told me that every morning she cuts a pita bread into four pieces, one piece for four children. She does the same thing when she gets home after work.”

Record number of Palestinian children displaced in West Bank in first half of 2025

New analysis by Save the Children has found that more children were displaced in the occupied West Bank during the first half of this year due to the demolitions of their homes by Israeli forces compared with any other corresponding period since records began.

The organisation said analysis of data on demolitions and displacement collected by OCHA showed 607 children were among the more than 1,200 people displaced in the first six months of 2025 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The figure represented an increase from 542 during the same period in 2024 and 328 in the first half of 2023.

It also said that since the war on Gaza began, there had been a sharp rise in displacement of Palestinian families due to the destruction of homes, impacting more than 2,850 children.

“According to OCHA data, more than 10,300 children have been displaced in the West Bank since records began in 2009 due to demolition of their homes. Of those nearly 80 percent of cases, or 8,200 children, were due to the fact their homes were built without Israeli-issued permits, which are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain,” Save the Children said, calling it “part of a longstanding, systematic policy to annex parts of the West Bank”.

‘We want our politicians to move from words to action’

At a protest in Parliament Square in London, Fiona Smith from the Oxfam charity told Al Jazeera that after watching “atrocity after atrocity being perpetrated on civilians in Gaza”, the protesters want to signal to the British government that “enough is enough.

“We want our politicians to move from words to action and actually make sure something tangible is put into place to make this violence stop,” she said.

“From an Oxfam perspective, our own aid workers are so hungry at the minute that they’re sleeping all the time,” Smith said.

“We know that aid has not been able to get into Gaza since March; there are hundreds of trucks in the Rafah crossing and Jordan waiting to go and feed these hungry people, but they simply cannot get access,” she added.

“What has been put into place – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – is basically a killing foundation.”

Starvation in Gaza making recovery from wounds much harder

Deirdre Nunan, a Canadian orthopaedic surgeon who has volunteered several times in Gaza, tells Al Jazeera that the situation in the besieged enclave is “immeasurably worse” than when she was last there in April.

“Right now, I am seeing severe hunger and starvation amongst both my colleagues and my patients … I see people that struggle to get through a day’s work because they don’t have the energy to do their normal duties,” she said, speaking from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.

“I am seeing horrific injuries that people are sustaining when they try to go and collect food aid at these distribution sites that turn into massacres and result in dozens, if not hundreds, of patients arriving at our emergency room, many of whom are killed or lose their limbs as a result of these gunshots.”

She added that she had seen people injured in Israeli air raids and attacks on their tents, with severe multi-system injuries and burns, and who were malnourished and did not have the ability to “get the extra calories and protein that they would normally need to heal from this kind of injury and to survive it”.

‘In Gaza, every child is experiencing some level of trauma’

Hratche Koundarjian, from the War Child nongovernmental organisation, is among the people demonstrating today in central London at the “Red Line for Gaza” protest that we reported on earlier.

We’ve spoken to him about the physical and psychological effects of the war on the children in Gaza. Here’s what he said:

“The stories we are hearing are horrific, beyond comprehension.

“I think you can talk about the statistics of 17,000 children killed and the many hundreds of thousands more who’ve been injured, but the reality is the individual stories. I was speaking to a colleague yesterday who had visited Gaza and spoke of children playing in the bombed sites of craters just a few minutes after a missile had struck.

“The violence becomes so normalised that civilians are just trying to do their best to work around it.

“War Child released a report last year that found about 94 percent of children in Gaza expect to die; nearly half hope for death. This is the worst place in the war to be a child by far; it’s absolutely horrendous. The situation needs to be resolved immediately.

“Normally, in a conflict, we would see roughly 20 percent of children experiencing some level of trauma – in Gaza, it’s every single child.

“Every single child would need the assistance of War Child and other organisations to deal with the trauma that’s been inflicted on them.

“It’s going to take decades to sort out this problem that’s being caused in a year and a half. It’s going to be an ongoing huge humanitarian response to deal with not just the basic needs but the massive mental health crisis that people there are experiencing.”

Al-Shifa Hospital’s kidney treatment out of service due to fuel shortage

Sources at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City have told Al Jazeera Arabic that the key medical facility’s dialysis department, which treats problems with kidneys, is now out of function due to fuel shortages amid the Israeli blockade.

Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya said al-Shifa Hospital could be completely out of service within hours due to the crisis.

Desperate families flee Deir el-Balah seeking food and safety

Many families are reluctant to move after the Israeli forced evacuation order in Deir el-Balah because they understand there are no alternative places that might be safe for them.

But hundreds of other families have been caught in [Israeli attacks] and were forced to leave their homes in Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis, due to Israel’s latest military incursion in the south.

Families are leaving while they are hungry. They are not just looking for safety; during the journey, they are looking for any source of food. They are unable to get any food supply or flour to make bread to keep them on their feet.

This crisis has been complicated by ongoing restrictions on UN agencies from delivering supplies to Gaza. We spoke with senior WFP officials who said they are doing their best to deliver aid trucks, but are still facing restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to enter Gaza from the Zikim crossing in the north of the Strip.

Families have been driven by hunger and desperation, and that is why we see them looting trucks, trying to get food.