A recent study published in The Lancet led by UNRWA and Johns Hopkins researchers reveals that nearly 55,000 children in Gaza are acutely malnourished due to Israeli restrictions on food, water, and medicine.
Nearly 220,000 children screened between January 2024 and August 2025.
15.8 per cent of preschool-aged children were acutely malnourished by August 2025.
Around 54,600 children require urgent treatment, including 12,800 severely wasted.
Highest rates recorded in Rafah (32 per cent) and Gaza City (30 per cent).
Sharp fluctuations in malnutrition linked to aid blockades and ceasefires.
A new study published in The Lancet on October 8, 2025 has found that nearly 55,000 children under the age of six in Gaza are acutely malnourished. The findings provide the clearest evidence yet that Israeli restrictions on food, water and medicine have driven the rise in malnutrition.
The UN confirmed a man-made famine in Gaza on August 22, 2025. On September 16, 2025, UN Commission of Inquiry released a report stating it found “reasonable grounds” that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The report cites mass killings, famine, destruction of healthcare and systemic targeting of civilians.
The latest study led by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) with researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health provides the most detailed month-by-month assessment to date of how child malnutrition in Gaza has worsened over the past two years of war.
Between January 2024 and August 2025, UNRWA health staff screened almost 220,000 children aged six months to five years for signs of wasting — a form of acute malnutrition measured by the mid-upper arm circumference.
The screenings, conducted at 16 UN health centres and 78 medical points across Gaza’s five governorates, revealed that rates of acute malnutrition rose and fell in direct correlation with the flow of humanitarian aid.
The study found that from January to June 2024, wasting affected between 5 per cent and 7 per cent of children. After four months of particularly tight aid restrictions in late 2024, the rate of acute malnutrition “jumped to 14 per cent by January 2025,” according to UNRWA.
A six-week ceasefire brought some relief, as “more aid was allowed in, and rates dropped back to 6 per cent by March 2025.” But following an “11-week total siege and subsequent continued restrictions,” acute malnutrition “surged again, reaching nearly 16 per cent by mid-August.”
This prevalence implies that there were about 54,600 acutely malnourished children across the Gaza Strip — nearly 12,800 of them severely malnourished — facing an estimated three- to five-fold higher risk of death than they would be if they were better nourishedUNRWA
“Tens of thousands of young children in the Gaza Strip are suffering from preventable malnutrition, disease and increased risk of death, as a consequence of the ongoing war. Without a lasting ceasefire and peace, this human suffering will continue,” said Dr Akihiro Seita, Director of UNRWA’s Health Department and senior author of the study.
In Rafah, there was a fourfold increase in wasting malnutrition after Israel launched a massive offensive into the city and levelled it, The Guardian reported on the study. The paper also found that in the Gaza City Governorate alone, over 15 per cent of children were acutely malnourished by the end of July 2025, affecting nearly 30 per cent of children in Gaza City by mid-August, according to UNRWA.
“Following two years of war and severe restrictions in humanitarian aid, tens of thousands of preschool aged children in the Gaza Strip are now suffering from preventable acute malnutrition and face an increased risk of mortality,” Masako Horino, the study’s lead investigator and a nutrition epidemiologist at UNRWA was quoted by British daily The Guardian.
Israel has denied responsibility for the crisis, saying it allows adequate food supplies into Gaza and accusing Hamas of obstructing or diverting aid — allegations humanitarian agencies reject. The Israeli agency Cogat claimed it “continues to support international organisations facilitating food delivery and production for Gaza’s civilian population”.
However, UNRWA and other aid agencies have repeatedly said Israeli restrictions and security procedures have made large-scale relief operations nearly impossible. According to the UN, more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed between May and July 2025 while trying to access humanitarian aid, most of them near distribution sites or food convoys.
The Lancet study offered some of the most definitive evidence yet of the impact of war and aid blockades on child health. In a commentary accompanying the paper, leading global health scholars Zulfiqar Bhutta, Jessica Fanzo and Paul Wise wrote: “It is now well established that the children of Gaza are starving and require immediate and sustained humanitarian assistance.”
They warned that beyond the immediate risk of death, the long-term health consequences of such widespread child malnutrition could persist for generations.
UNRWA, founded in 1949 to serve Palestinian refugees, said its staff gathered the data under “the most challenging conditions”, including the deaths of more than 370 colleagues during the war, 21 of them health workers. The agency has called for “unimpeded, competent, international humanitarian nutritional, medical, economic and social services” to reach Gaza’s children.
On October 9, 2025, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that an agreement to secure the release of hostages in Gaza would take effect only after receiving cabinet approval. Hours after Israel and Hamas reached the first phase of a ceasefire plan brokered by Donald Trump, plumes of smoke from Israeli strikes were seen rising over Gaza.