It Should Not Be Controversial to Plead for Gaza's Children

The Atlantic

23-05-2025

Imagine a child at home, crying. She is inconsolable, screaming for food. A neighbor tries to offer some bread; the door is blocked. A grocery store down the road has plenty of supplies; no one can get to it. The clock ticks down and the child starves, her baby fat melting to nothing.
Multiply that possibility by thousands. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian children are starving while food is sitting in trucks, just out of reach. Israel began a total blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza on March 2, the longest such stoppage since the current war began, putting the region at 'critical risk of famine,' according to food-security experts. Israel finally agreed to ease the blockade on Sunday and said that 93 trucks had crossed the border on Tuesday and that an additional 107 had yesterday. Aid has begun to reach civilians after reported delays. But children continue to go hungry.
There is no question that the situation for children in Gaza is grave. The World Health Organization stated on May 13 that since Israel's blockade had begun, 57 children had reportedly died from malnutrition, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. More than 14,000 children under 5 are at risk of 'severe acute malnutrition' in Gaza over roughly the next year, according to a recent food-security report. Tom Fletcher, a United Nations official, in a widely shared misstatement of that statistic, warned on Tuesday that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours unless aid was delivered to them. A former Israeli-government spokesperson told The Times of Israel that Fletcher had caused 'a global media panic about something totally made up.' Getting the facts straight in dire situations such as this is crucial. But the truth remains that children are starving, needlessly, while aid struggles to reach them.
In response to the developments in Gaza, the children's entertainer Rachel Accurso, known to babies and toddlers the world over as 'Ms. Rachel,' made an emotional plea in a video posted to her Instagram earlier this week. (The video, which referred to the inaccurate 14,000-babies stat, no longer appears on her page.) While holding her own round-cheeked baby daughter, she showed a disturbing photo of a gaunt Palestinian baby, whose each and every rib was visible under her skin. 'Dear world leaders, please help this baby,' Accurso said. 'Please, please look at her; just please look in her eyes for one minute.'
Accurso has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian children, who have suffered at such a scale that in December 2023, UNICEF called Gaza 'the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.' Her focus on children is apt: Nearly half of Gaza's population is children—and children are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. Yet she has faced backlash for her statements; last month, a pro-Israel group called for the Department of Justice to investigate whether she was working for Hamas. ('This accusation is not only absurd, it's patently false,' she told The New York Times.) Online commenters have accused her of focusing on Palestinians to the exclusion of Israeli children. (She has not ignored Israeli children—she has shared sympathetic posts about the effects of Hamas's October 7 attacks on children. 'I'm thinking not only of the Israeli children taken hostage,' she wrote recently, 'but also those who witnessed horrific acts of violence that day—their innocence stolen in an instant.') In an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan, Accurso said, 'It's sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering.'
That a person whose job is to care about children should be criticized for caring about children is ludicrous. It should not need to be said, and it should not be controversial to say it, but: Starving children is wrong. If pointing that out lands you in hot water, that is a symptom of something deeply broken in our culture. Everyone should care if children are needlessly suffering, wherever they are suffering.
If or when the aid sitting in those trucks reaches the Palestinian people, it will go only a fraction of the way toward addressing widespread hunger. What the food-security report released earlier this month actually stated is that the entire population of Gaza is food insecure. It also estimated that from May to September of this year, nearly 470,000 people will experience 'catastrophic food insecurity,' meaning that more than 1 in 5 will face starvation if the situation doesn't change. Nearly 71,000 children under 5 and nearly 17,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women were projected to need treatment for 'acute malnutrition' between April of this year and March 2026. (Of those 71,000 children, 14,100 cases—the figure that the UN official seems to have mis-cited—are projected to be 'severe.')
According to The New York Times, Israel has publicly claimed that its blockade in Gaza was not a threat to civilians. In a statement on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had sent 92,000 aid trucks into Gaza since October 7, 2023. 'More than enough food to feed everyone in Gaza,' he said. This claim contradicts statements from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and multiple international aid organizations that hunger in the region is at crisis levels. And anonymous Israeli-military sources told the Times that, in private, some officials have admitted that food is running out. Israel has also said that it started the blockade in part because it believed Hamas was stealing aid and using it to fuel its fight—an accusation Hamas has denied. Netanyahu also asserted on Thursday that Israel had 'devised a mechanism' with U.S. allies in which 'American companies will distribute the food directly to Palestinian families,' in 'safe zones secured' by the Israeli military. The UN has criticized the plan on the grounds that, among other things, it amounts to forced displacement, requiring Palestinians to relocate in order to access aid.
The grim reality that war is hell does not mean that anyone should accept mass starvation among children, anywhere, as inevitable. And we should certainly not accept it when available food is kept from children's reach. (We should be just as alarmed that the United States is contributing to global malnutrition in its own way: By gutting agencies such as USAID, the country has disrupted the flow of assistance that previously went to malnourished children around the world, including the supply of a vital nutritional paste. According to the WHO, nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 globally are attributed to malnutrition.)
Even before Israel's blockade of Gaza, getting lifesaving aid to starving children and their families in the Strip was difficult. The UN's former emergency-relief coordinator has described the task as 'in all practical terms, impossible.' Trucks carrying supplies have had limited points of entry, faced long waits at the border and looting, and been unable to be sure of safe passage if they do get into the region. Israeli fire has hit aid convoys on multiple occasions and killed many humanitarian workers. (Earlier this year, Israel disputed the UN's figures on the rate at which aid was entering Gaza. But Israel's own numbers fell far short of the amount of aid required to meet basic food needs, as estimated by the World Food Programme.)
David A. Graham: A deadly strike in Gaza
The trucks let in so far are addressing only a drop in the ocean of need—and the decision to allow them through cannot be described as a good-faith effort to prevent a potential famine. Rather, comments made by Netanyahu suggest that this was a concession made to retain the support of Israel's allies, including the United States. The Washington Post recently reported that in a video of Netanyahu posted to social media, he said that 'we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.' His professed concern seemed to be not that people are starving, but that allies had told him they 'could not 'handle pictures of mass starvation,'' the Post reported.
In her Instagram post, Accurso asked viewers to think of children they knew and loved. She said of Gaza's children: 'If you're not going to stand up for them, you might as well come out and say you don't see them like you see our kids.' Another icon of children's TV, the late, great Mister Rogers, famously said that when we see scary things in the news, we should 'look for the helpers.' In Gaza, we know where the helpers are. They're right there at the gates, trying to get in.