SHP’s Paul Wise, MD, MPH, a pediatrician who works on behalf of children in conflict worldwide, writes in this commentary in The Lancet: “It is now well established that the children of Gaza are starving and require immediate and sustained humanitarian assistance.”

The Oct. 8 commentary accompanies a new study by UN food security experts, who found that more than 54,600 children younger than 5 in Gaza may be acutely malnourished, with more than 12,800 severely affected.

Israel and Hamas signed ceasefire agreement on Thursday, pledging to bring home the Israeli hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and triggering a two-year ground and air assault on the Gaza Strip. Palestinian health authorities say Israeli forces have killed more than 67,000 people; the United Nations declared in August that nearly half a million Gazans were trapped in famine.

“There is an urgent need to go beyond rhetoric and establish actionable steps for global leaders to take, perhaps through the G7 and G20 and regional blocks such as the Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,” writes Wise and his co-authors, Jessica Fanzo of Columbia University and Zulfiqar Bhutta of the Aga Khan University in Pakistan and the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada. Wise is a the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society and professor of pediatrics and of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The new data by the UN team “strongly suggest that restrictions on food and assistance have resulted in severe malnutrition among children in the Gaza Strip, a reality that will undoubtedly impact their future health and development outcomes for generations,” Wise and his colleagues wrote.

Read Full Commentary in The Lancet