Director of the Children's Hospital at Nasser Complex: This is how children's bodies are affected by starvation and malnutrition.

The director of the Children's Hospital at Nasser Medical Complex, Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, warned that the number of starvation deaths in the Gaza Strip will rise, particularly among children, unless food and baby formula are brought in as quickly as possible.

He said that nearly one million children are threatened by hunger and malnutrition, noting that the bodies of children in the nutrition department at Nasser Medical Complex have been reduced to bones covered with skin, having lost muscle and subcutaneous fatty tissue.

He stressed that there are one million citizens in the Khan Yunis Governorate in the southern Gaza Strip, most of whom suffer from varying degrees of malnutrition, but the most serious cases are among children due to the lack of milk.

Dr. Al-Farra said in an interview with Al Jazeera that mothers were using sweeteners and water, and some were feeding infants as young as two and three months old lentil soup in their bottles. This is inconsistent with global nutrition protocols.

Dr. Al-Farra explained that children are more affected by malnutrition than adults, who can tolerate prolonged fasting. Children are a fragile group, with small livers and limited energy stores, and they also have limited muscle and adipose tissue.

The main source of energy for children is milk, whether breastfed or bottle-fed. Once a child loses this daily food intake within 24 hours, their metabolism stops by 35%.

When the body exhausts all its energy sources, it enters a phase in which all vital and metabolic processes in the body are on the verge of stopping. This is evident in a severe drop in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, and temperature, and even the kidneys begin to function at their lowest levels.

At this stage, according to Dr. Al-Farra, blood salts become imbalanced and there is a stagnation throughout the body, culminating in the child falling into a coma, a stage just prior to death. He said these stages take a long time in adults.

Gaza Strip hospitals documented the deaths of six Palestinians, including two children, over the past 24 hours due to starvation and a shortage of medicine.