The 10-Year-Old Boy who has Become the Face of Starvation in Gaza

Yazan Kafarneh on his hospital bed in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday. By Monday, he was dead. Hatem Ali/Associated Press
Yazan Kafarneh on his hospital bed in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday. By Monday, he was dead. Hatem Ali/Associated Press
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The 10-Year-Old Boy who has Become the Face of Starvation in Gaza

Yazan Kafarneh on his hospital bed in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday. By Monday, he was dead. Hatem Ali/Associated Press
Yazan Kafarneh on his hospital bed in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday. By Monday, he was dead. Hatem Ali/Associated Press

By Bilal Shbair, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman

It is all too easy to trace the skull beneath the Gazan 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 shriveled, life reduced to little more than a thin mask over an imminent death.

In one of a series of news photographs of the boy, Yazan Kafarneh, taken with his family’s permission as he struggled for his life, his long-lashed eyes stare out, unfocused. In that widely shared picture online, his right hand, bandaged over an intravenous line, contracts in on itself at an awkward angle, a visible marker of his cerebral palsy.

He was 10, but in photographs from his last days at a clinic in southern Gaza, he looks both small for his age and at the same time ancient. By Monday, Yazan was dead.

The pictures of Yazan circulating on social media have quickly made him the face of starvation in Gaza.

Aid groups have warned that deaths from malnutrition-related causes have only just begun for Gaza’s more than two million people. Five months into Israel’s campaign against Hamas and its siege of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are close to starvation, United Nations officials say. Almost no aid has reached northern Gaza for weeks, after major UN agencies mostly suspended their operations, citing mass looting of their cargoes by desperate Gazans, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of roads damaged during the war.

At least 20 Palestinian children have died from malnutrition and dehydration, according to Gazan health officials. Like Yazan, who required medicines that were in acutely short supply in Gaza, many of those who died also suffered from health conditions that further placed their lives at risk, health officials said.

“It’s often that a child is extremely malnourished, and then they get sick and that virus is ultimately what causes that death,” said Heather Stobaugh, a malnutrition expert at Action Against Hunger, an aid group. “But they would not have died if they were not malnourished.”

Gaza health officials said that two of the children who died from malnutrition were less than 2 days old. While cautioning that it was difficult to say what had happened without more information, Dr. Stobaugh said that malnutrition in pregnant mothers and the lack of formula could easily have led to the deaths of infants, who are the most vulnerable to extreme malnutrition.

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.

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. After the Israeli bombardment on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel, his parents fled their home, taking Yazan and their three other sons to somewhere they hoped would be safer.

Then they fled again, and again, and again, his father said, searching for somewhere better for Yazan, whose condition meant that he could not tolerate the chaotic, unsanitary shelters. Every move was complicated by the fact that Yazan could not walk.

His parents could do little but watch as his health steadily deteriorated.

“Day after day, I saw my son getting weaker,” said his father, Shareef Kafarneh, a 31-year-old taxi driver from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.

Eventually, they ended up in Al-Awda, in the southern city of Rafah, where Yazan died on Monday morning. He had suffered from both malnutrition and a respiratory infection, according to Dr. Jabr al-Shaer, a pediatrician who treated him. Dr. al-Shaer blamed the lack of food for weakening Yazan’s already frail immune system.

Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and around 0.8 percent of children under the age of 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organization said.

Five months into the war, that appears to have spiked: About 15 percent of Gazan children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, as well as roughly 5 percent in the south, the World Health Organization said in February. With half of all Gazan infants fed by formula, Dr. Stobaugh said, the lack of clean water in Gaza to make the formula is compounding the crisis.

Adele Khodr, the Middle East director at UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, said this week, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”

The situation has left parents frantic.

Ali Qannan, 34, does not know what is wrong with his 13-month-old son, Ahmed, who is being treated at the European Hospital in southern Gaza. Neither, he said, do the doctors at the five hospitals he has taken Ahmed to since the baby developed a swollen belly, diarrhea and vomiting a month after the war began. Ahmed has gotten ever worse, with trouble breathing and worrisome blood tests, but, given the war, the doctors say they cannot run the proper diagnostic tests, Mr. Qannan said.

Every pediatrician has had a different suggestion for what to feed Ahmed, Mr. Qannan said — boiled potatoes, bread, special fortified formula used for treating severely malnourished children — but each was either impossible to find or seemed not to help. Mr. Qannan says he is sure that malnutrition has something to do with Ahmed’s problems.

“Look at him. He’s turned into a skeleton,” Mr. Qannan said of his son on Wednesday. “I need help from someone, anyone, to help me get out of Gaza as soon as possible.”

World leaders are increasingly warning about catastrophic hunger in Gaza, and even some of Israel’s closest allies are pressing Israel to do more. On Thursday, President Biden announced that the US military would set up a floating pier to help move supplies into the enclave.

On Friday, the Israeli agency known as COGAT, which regulates aid to Palestinians, said, “Israel is also exerting a constant and significant effort to find solutions that will bring aid more smoothly into the Gaza Strip, and into its northern area in particular.”

Before war tore Gaza apart, Yazan Kafarneh was gradually seeing an improvement in his long struggle with cerebral palsy, his family said.

Physical therapists provided by nonprofits treated him at home, while medicines helped improve his condition, his father said. He might not have been able to walk, but he could swim. Mr. Kafarneh carefully planned out a high-nutrient diet for his son based around soft foods, including eggs for breakfast and the bananas Yazan loved.

But the medications disappeared as the war broke out, and as the family’s food supplies dwindled, Mr. Kafarneh said he had been unable to maintain Yazan’s special diet. He swapped out eggs in the morning for bread he made into mush using tea; he struggled to find bananas, so he tried giving Yazan other sweet foods, even though the price of sugar had soared. The already difficult challenge of feeding him properly turned nearly impossible.

On Feb. 25, his family brought Yazan to Al-Awda’s pediatric wing. He had pneumonia, which his weeks of hunger and already fragile condition had aggravated. Although the doctors and nurses gave him antibiotics for the infection, they could not find a reinforced nutrition drink that had been used to nourish him before the war, said Halima Tubasi, a nurse who cared for Yazan before he died.

Mr. Kafarneh said the cause of his son’s death was no mystery.

“The foods he used to have aren’t being eaten anymore,” he said. “The medicines and supplementary foods weren’t available at all.”

The New York Times



Syria's Economy Reborn after Being Freed from Assad

Under Assad, Syria was under heavy economic sanctions and mired in seemingly endless crisis - AFP
Under Assad, Syria was under heavy economic sanctions and mired in seemingly endless crisis - AFP
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Syria's Economy Reborn after Being Freed from Assad

Under Assad, Syria was under heavy economic sanctions and mired in seemingly endless crisis - AFP
Under Assad, Syria was under heavy economic sanctions and mired in seemingly endless crisis - AFP

When Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria, merchants like Youssef Rajab kept much of their imported stock hidden for fear of arrest for breaking the law.

But after opposition factions toppled Assad in a lightning offensive last month, Rajab put previously banned foreign goods such as chocolate, biscuits and shampoo back on the shelf.

Such products are now openly on sale in Damascus, and foreign currency is once again traded without fear.
Under Assad, Syria was mired in corruption, under heavy economic sanctions, and in seemingly endless crisis.
Foreign currency was in carefully controlled supply, and engaging in its trade or in the sale of banned goods could have meant a stay in one of the country's notorious jails.

"A day after the regime fell, I brought out all the foreign merchandise I'd been hiding and put it for sale, without having to worry," Rajab told AFP.

"It was a strange feeling, but I was happy," added the 23-year-old, speaking beside shelves stacked with imported products.

Previously, the few imported goods that were available were smuggled in from Lebanon by traders who risked arrest, or were acquired by bribing officials as businessmen controlled imports to a country wracked by 13 years of civil war.

"It's true that now we have great freedom to engage in business, but it has also been chaotic," said Rajab.

On every street corner, makeshift money changers now tout for business from passers-by.

"It's a job that was done in secret before," said Amir Halimeh, sitting at a small table on which there were wads of Syrian pounds and US dollars.

"We used to refer to dollars as 'mint' or 'parsley' or something else green" to bypass surveillance, he added.

- Currency market 'freed' -

Assad's government kept a firm grip on foreign currency dealings as a way to control the economy, and any freelance operators faced punishment of seven years in prison and a heavy fine.

"The market has now been completely freed... as has the exchange rate," the moneychanger said.

The pound lost about 90 percent of its value against the US dollar in 2011, the year Syria descended into civil war after a brutal crackdown on democracy protests.

Now it is being traded at between 11,000 and 12,000 to the greenback.

Before Damascus fell to the coalition led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, the black market rate soared to 30,000 pounds for one dollar.

"The economy in the future Syria will be free and competitive," the interim government's Economy Minister Bassel Abdel Hanan told reporters.

He said the new authorities would implement "policies aimed at protecting domestic output, supporting the industrial sector and protecting agriculture".

They have yet to elaborate on their future economic plans during the three-month interim phase that began in December.

Economics professor Adnan Suleiman of Damascus University said that "the economic model that existed before the fall of the regime... was a market economy", but a "distorted" one.

- Sanctions -

"Supply and demand were not free. Instead of competition there was a monopoly," he said of people close to Assad who controlled different sectors of the economy.

In an effort to turn the page, the interim government has been lobbying for international sanctions to be lifted.

Earlier this month, the US Treasury Department announced it was providing additional sanctions relief on some activities for the next six months to ease access to basic services, including fuel and humanitarian aid.

Asaad al-Shaibani, Syria's top diplomat, told the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday: "Removing economic sanctions is the key for the stability of Syria."

They had been imposed for the benefit of Syrians, but are now "against the Syrian people", he said.

"We inherited a collapsed state from the Assad regime, there is no economic system," Shaibani said, adding that "the economy in the future will be open".

Under Assad, fuel sales were a monopoly and were severely limited.

But now vendors openly sell cans of petrol and fuel oil on the streets of the capital -- where new models of car have also made an appearance.

Previously, the import of vehicles was tightly regulated.

Syria's war took a terrible toll not only on the people, but also on its infrastructure.

Damage to power plants and pipelines has caused power cuts lasting up to 20 hours a day.

"The former regime left a huge legacy," said Suleiman.

"The greatest task facing future governments is to finance development and reconstruction."