GAZA – Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones.

In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah. At least 30 child victims of malnutrition have been recorded in Gaza, but almost all died in the north, until recently the area with the most extreme shortages of food and medical care, where a top US aid official said famine had taken hold in some areas.

The arrival of Israeli troops in Rafah in May shifted the grim calculus of threat in the strip. “The ongoing situation in Rafah is a disaster for children,” said Jonathan Crickx, chief of communication for Unicef in Palestine. “If nutrition supplies, especially ready-to-use therapeutic food, used to address malnutrition among children, cannot be distributed, the treatment of more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition will be interrupted.”

For months, northern Gaza, cut off by an Israeli military cordon, had been hungrier than the south. Aid mostly trickled into the strip through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, and the Kerem Shalom gateway from Israel. Now the border with Egypt is controlled by Israeli troops, the Rafah crossing is closed, and fighting has choked shipments of humanitarian aid through Kerem Shalom. The supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza overall has dropped by two-thirds since 7 May, when the operation began, UN figures showed last week.

Much of the food still getting into Gaza is shipped to the north through new crossings, meaning the crisis there has eased, but people in the south are running out of supplies, the World Food Programme chief for Palestine said. “[In the north,] it is a situation that has improved significantly from five weeks ago,” said Matthew Hollingworth. “On the other side, in the middle and in particular the south, what we’ve seen just since 7 May is the situation begin to deteriorate again. “We’ve got a week or so before people will genuinely run out of all assistance they were able to receive through April and the start of May.” (The Guardian)…[+]