How are Palestinian children dying from hunger?

Expert answers from Palestinian voices

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Palestinian perspectives on this question

Answers (1)

Expert perspectives from Palestinian voices

This video by المُخبر الاقتصادي+ explains the following:

  • An infant girl, one year or 18 months old, goes to sleep hungry and wakes up from the pain and looks at her mother’s face, who has no choice but to try to breastfeed her. But in light of the fact that the mother’s milk is not enough to nourish or satisfy the hunger of a child of this age, and in light of the fact that the mother herself is also suffering from hunger, the food market keeps the girl crying and the mother keeps crying next to her while feeling in front of her infant daughter. On the contrary, and helplessness, the girl keeps crying while feeling sharp pain in her stomach under her rib cage in the absence of food.
  • The girl is exposed within hours to a rapid depletion of energy after her body begins to exhaust the glycogen stores in the liver and muscles. The girl’s blood sugar drops and her lips begin to tremble, her eyes keep opening and closing, and her crying turns into sobbing.
  • On the second day, the little girl's body switches to using the fat in her body as an energy source, so what is known as ketones appears in her blood. The girl's legs and hands become thinner, and her face becomes pale. At this stage, the girl begins to lose her ability to cry, sleeps for longer periods, and suffers from slight cramps that reflect the pain of her stomach, which is searching for food that does not exist.
  • After three or four days, the fat under the girl's skin is consumed, so her body begins to break down muscles to obtain protein. This makes the girl unable to raise her head or sit, and makes her body bones clearly prominent, and her skin is very thin.
  • After 10 days of starvation, muscle wasting is added to the contraction of the immune system because the girl's lymph nodes atrophy and the number of white blood cells in her body decreases. In her case, any simple illness that could be normal for any normal child, such as a mild cold, diarrhea, or a mild cough, the girl could die and not be able to bear it because her body is in a state of immune collapse and unable to resist.
  • In the third week from hunger, the girl has lost almost two-thirds of her body fat and muscle and reaches the final stage, in which she suffers from weak heart contractions and irregular heartbeats due to difficulty breathing. The girl in this stage breathes with extreme difficulty.
  • At any moment in this stage, the girl takes her last breath and her heart beats for the last time before it stops completely. Her eyelids close forever and she dies in silence before she is taken from her mother’s embrace and placed in her father’s hands under the ground.