A two-year-old Palestinian child called Khaled has died after eating bread made from animal feed in the northern Gaza Strip on 27 February.
“The older children vomited what they had eaten and recovered”, Khaled’s grandmother Ibtisam Al-Kahlout said, reported Al Jazeera.
“As for the younger children, their condition worsened after they ate the bread,” she said. “The doctors said he was poisoned by bread, fodder, and barley that we ate.”
Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry, has called on international agencies to urgently provide food and drinking water throughout Gaza to avert an enormous humanitarian catastrophe.
“This escalating famine could kill thousands of citizens due to malnutrition and dehydration in the coming days in front of the eyes of the world,” he said.
The UN humanitarian agency, OCHA, says humanitarian organisations are being “systemically denied access” to the north and the south Gaza and that humanitarian aid convoys are coming under fire.
A senior UN humanitarian aid official has said that one-quarter of Gaza’s population – estimated to be at least 576,000 people – is a step away from famine.
