GAZA, (PIC)
10-year-old Yazan Kafarna died on Monday of hunger and malnourishment at the Abu Yousef an-Najjar Hospital in Rafah after his body turned into a “skeleton” in every sense of the word — an incident that has revealed the size of the genocidal and starvation war that are being carried out against the Palestinians in Gaza in full view of the entire world.
Yazan’s mother, who is heartbroken by his departure, has never imagined in her life or her worst nightmares that her child would die like that.
Yazan, whose emaciated appearance offered the world a stark illustration of Gaza’s accelerating starvation crisis, has become one of the latest children in the war-torn territory to die of severe malnutrition.
Images and videos shared of Yazan from March 2 show him lying on a hospital bed with sunken cheeks and an emaciated body while being covered in blankets and receiving fluids intravenously.
In one video, his father shows a photo of his son looking healthy before the war started.
“Before the war, he was healthy, he had access to all the food and medical care he needed. When the war started, everything was cut off,” he said, adding that his son’s photo was taken just a week before the war started.
Yazan’s family was displaced from Beit Hanoun in Gaza to Rafah in the south.
A family member told Al Jazeera satellite channel in an interview that Yazan reached a stage where he was surviving on just a few morsels of bread.
“He was living on scraps of bread we found with great difficulty and brought at extremely high costs. When we did not find food, we would have to give him sugar just so he could stay alive. The main reason he has reached a point where he just looks like bones is a lack of nutrition,” one family member, Mohamed al-Kafarna said.
According to Kafarna, Yazan reached a point where he needed specific food and nutrients to keep him alive after losing so much of his body weight, however, the family could not get hold of anything they required.
Yazan had suffered from cerebral palsy from birth, meaning he had to follow a special diet and take supplements. However, his family said that since the start of the war, he had not had access to his needs.
Yazan’s death has increased the death toll of Gaza children as a result of malnutrition and hunger to 16 victims.
