Doctors say malnutrition has permanently stunted children who survived the famine

Doctors treating a six-year-old girl in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City have told her family that what the hunger did to her body cannot be undone. Amira Rashid weighs 12.5kg, measures one metre, and has the bone age of a two-year-old. She spends her days on a mattress with too little strength to get up, her hands marked by the drips she has been given.

Her mother, Aya Rashid, took her to the Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi children's hospital in January 2025 after the girl complained of chest pain, and doctors there found her height and weight far below what her age called for. Tests returned a diagnosis of severe acute malnutrition that had already caused severe stunting. The family had stayed in the north of the Strip throughout the war, and by August 2025, when the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine in Gaza City, the mother says flour had gone from the markets and she was baking barley bread.

The girl was admitted, and her weight did not move. Her mother expected the ceasefire that began in October 2025 to change that once food started entering again. Ten months on, doctors say her body is no longer responding to treatment and that they can find no allergy or absorption disorder to account for it. They now tell the family the case needs treatment outside Gaza.

The loss is not only physical. Amira would have started her first year of school this month. She cannot read or write, and the children she spends her time with are two and three years old.

A second case in the same city shows the same cause reaching a child a stage earlier. Amna Abu al-Hasani was carried by a mother who was malnourished through the pregnancy and was delivered by emergency caesarean in the eighth month, weighing 1.2kg. At two months doctors diagnosed an enlarged heart caused by weakened heart muscle, together with severe stunting. She is 10 months old now, weighs 5.5kg and has recently been classed as severely acutely malnourished. Her father, Youssef, 29, says doctors trace her complications in the heart, kidneys and lungs to her having been born underweight. She holds an urgent referral for treatment abroad, and her turn has not come.

The scale behind the two cases was set out in the IPC's August 2025 report, which put the number of under-fives in Gaza expected to be acutely malnourished through June 2026 at 132,000 or more, and the number of malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women needing urgent nutritional support at close to 55,500.

Stunting is what separates a hunger crisis from the period after it. Food that arrives later does not give back the growth that was missed, which is why a family can watch the markets refill while the diagnosis stays exactly where it was. Counted this way — in bone age, in a school year that will not be attended — the casualties of the famine keep being added up long after the food comes back.