The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Friday that a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished, blaming Israel's "policy of starvation".
The aid group, known by its French initials MSF, said the "Israeli authorities' deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive".
It said its staff in the besieged and war-torn Palestinian territory were receiving growing numbers of malnourished patients.
"Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old and pregnant and breastfeeding women at MSF facilities last week, 25 percent were malnourished," it said.
At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, it said the number of people needing care for malnutrition had quadrupled since mid-May, while "rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone".
"This is not just hunger," the organisation said. "It's deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities."
MSF spokeswoman Yvonne Eckert told AFP that the charity's staff in Gaza had last week enrolled "around 600 children under five to the ATFC (Ambulatory Therapeutic Feeding Centre) programmes as new admissions for malnutrition".
- 'Weaponisation of food' -
Warning that there is now "barely any food available in most of the Strip", MSF insisted in its statement that "the weaponisation of food to exert pressure on a civilian population must not be normalised".
"Israeli authorities must allow food and aid supplies into Gaza at scale."
MSF was among more than 100 aid and rights groups who warned this week that "mass starvation" was spreading in Gaza.
Israel has hit back at the growing international criticism that it was behind chronic food shortages in Gaza, accusing Hamas of deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an organisation backed by the United States and Israel, began distributing aid in Gaza in late May as Israel eased a two-month total blockade, effectively sidelining the longstanding UN-led system.
The United Nations, which has refused to work with GHF over concerns it violates basic humanitarian principles, said this week that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid in Gaza since it started operations, nearly three-quarters of them near GHF sites.
"These food distributions are not humanitarian aid; they are war crimes committed in broad daylight and presented to the world with compassionate language," Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF deputy medical coordinator in Gaza, said in the statement.
"Those who go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's food distributions know that they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head."
