MORE than half a dozen doctors, all of whom have worked in Gaza and two of whom are there now, spoke in heart-rending detail at a press conference last Thursday about Israel’s barbaric bombing and starvation of the Palestinian population, especially children, and the challenges they face to save them.

The speakers were affiliated with Doctors Against Genocide, described by one of the group’s founders, Detroit physician Nidal Jboor, as “a global coalition of healthcare professionals watching a genocide unfolding in real time.”

They are doing far more than watching, however, but their desperate efforts to save patients under almost impossible conditions have left all of them with a sense of desperation and urgency that the world is failing to act against something that could so easily be stopped.

A child dies in Gaza every 40 minutes, Jboor said, and not just from the bombings. “There is no oxygen, no anaesthesia, no dialysis, no cancer care,” he said. Just four hospitals remain barely functioning, and “now, doctors are starving alongside their patients.”

“This is not a war, this is an annihilation,” Jboor said, “a genocide of children” that could be halted today. “They only need a decision from the leaders of the US to stop being complicit in these crimes, in our name and with our tax dollars.”

His words reflected the frustration his colleagues felt about everything they witnessed inside Gaza’s besieged hospitals. “Our efforts are almost futile,” said Razan al-Nahhas, an emergency room physician who had just returned to Washington, DC, after spending two months in Gaza, her second trip since last November. But things are “drastically different now,” Nahhas said.

“The war is worse, the malnutrition is worse, the targeting of children is worse,” she said. The deliberate attacks on civilians have meant that “the majority of patients I took care of in the ER were children,” so compromised by malnutrition that they could not be saved from injuries that should not have killed them.

“I would take care of children in the ER and then go visit them a week later, two weeks later in the ICU, and they were not getting better because of their lack of nutrition,” Nahhas said. “This is a war on children through starvation.”

The children, the doctors said, come in so deeply in shock that no matter how bad their injuries, many do not cry but stare blankly into space. “Children who die from starvation do not even cry towards the end,” said Mohamed Kuziez, who, like Nahhas, spent two months working in Gaza, and who trained in clinical nutrition.

“Even if today this blockade was to end, a significant portion of these children are still liable to suffer severe long-term effects and death,” Kuziez said. “Kids who have been starved and deprived, when you provide food to them, develop something called refeeding syndrome. We saw this with people who were freed from the death camps after the Holocaust,” Kuziez said, referring to the pattern of cardiac arrest observed in those starved survivors once they were able to eat again. “That’s how we know about this condition.”

It was an apt analogy. Many of the photos and videos the doctors showed during their presentations were reminiscent of  —  and virtually identical to  —  the horrifying pictures we saw when the Nazi death camps were finally liberated.

“You see the bodies of the babies and they are just skin over the bone,” said Ahmed al-Farra, a doctor currently working at a Gaza hospital. “No muscle, no fat, they are senile faces.” Showing a photo of one of his patients, Farra observed, “he looks like an old man. He is four years old.” Farra expressed shock that “this is the first time for me to see starvation and thirst used as a weapon.”

Among the phenomena he has observed since the genocide began is a steep rise in premature births, now around 60 to 70 per cent up from 20 to 30 per cent.

“We are talking about targeting a generation of Palestinian children,” Farra said. Deprived of the essential nutrients in their first three years, children’s nervous systems are affected. Children cannot co-operate with others, concentrate or learn. “These complications will continue throughout their lives,” he said.

“For two months there has been zero aid, zero food,” said Brennan Bollman, a US emergency room physician who entered Gaza a couple of days after the complete blockade started. “Two million people are starving right now just because the Israeli government has closed the gates. As a global community, we cannot stand by quietly as food is used as a weapon of war,” she said. And, if aid is administered by the military or private contractors, “it would also be weaponised,” she said.

Bollman was there when Israel broke the ceasefire and resumed its bloody bombardment on March 18. “I saw entire families as victims, nearly half of them children,” she recalled. “Their bodies severely burned, broken open, blown apart. Children who survived lay in hospital beds afterwards, and I expected them to be crying,” she said. “But often I saw them stare off blankly because although they had lived, they had lost their siblings, their parents, their entire worlds.”

Like her colleagues, she reiterated the challenges the doctors in Gaza face as they endeavour to save their patients. “You cannot heal people without supplies and medicines,” Bollman said. “And no matter how skilled they are in caring for the horrific wounds caused by bombs, the human body cannot heal without food.”

That food is sitting at the border in at least 3,000 trucks, stuck there so long that even the non-perishable supplies are expiring. Fresh fruits have been banned by Israel from entering Gaza, Kuziez reported, resulting in outbreaks of scurvy.

“At any given moment at Rafah Crossing, there is a line-up of trucks, a convoy that extends three to five miles,” said Marybeth Brownlee, who has experience in field feeding operations in dangerous environments. Even if the trucks begin to move, they are held up by what Brownlee described as “bureaucratic warfare,” causing further delays.

And now, as Gaza’s children wait, and world leaders ignore them or remain complicit in their demise, the lights are about to go out for good.

“The fuel we have left at the hospital is enough for only three more days,” said Hamza Nabhan, a paediatrician who spoke from a Gaza hospital. “Three days after that, no ventilators, no incubators, no life.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.