Gaza girl’s fight for life reveals a generation’s silent hunger

Eleven-year-old Dana Al-Hajj’s ordeal did not end with the Israeli military destroying her family home in Khan Younas; her pale and skeletal body narrates the grim tales of every Palestinian child in Gaza about inhumane oppression as she lies weak and silent beside her mother in a crumbling tent in Deir al Balah.

Once a child with mild disabilities, Dana now suffers from severe malnutrition and rapidly deteriorating health, her body reduced to skin and bones, her voice replaced by faint whimpers of pain.

Her family has been displaced from Khan Younis and is now living in a makeshift shelter on a bare concrete floor, with no protection from the summer heat or the winter cold.

“She used to be almost normal,” Dana’s mother told Anadolu. “Now she doesn’t even recognize food. She won’t eat canned meals. She cries all day from hunger, and I can’t do anything. Even milk is gone.”

Dana’s thin frame reflects the trauma inflicted on an entire generation of Gaza’s children. The war, compounded by an Israeli-imposed blockade and the total closure of aid crossings since early March, has driven Gaza into unprecedented famine.