He was 10, but in photographs from his last days in Gaza, he looks both small for his age and at the same time ancient. By the next day, Yazan was dead.
It is all too easy to trace the skull beneath the boy’s face, the pallid skin stretching tight over every curve of bone and sagging with every hollow. His chin juts with a disturbing sharpness. His flesh has shrunk and shrivelled, life reduced to little more than a thin mask over an imminent death.
The pictures of Yazan circulating on social media have quickly made him the face of starvation in Gaza. That dovetailed with an account given by an aid group, ActionAid, which said that a doctor at Al-Awda maternity hospital in northern Gaza had told the group that malnourished mothers were giving birth to stillborn children.Credit:Yazan’s parents had struggled for months to care for their son, whose condition, experts say, would have meant he had trouble swallowing and needed a soft, high-nutrition diet.
Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gaza residents had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and about 0.8 per cent of children under 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organisation said.
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